AirAsia Plane Debris and Bodies Found; Little Hope of Any Survivors

Surabaya, Indonesia: The mystery of Indonesia's missing airliner was partly solved on Tuesday, when rescue teams retrieved and tallied a grim inventory of bodies and debris from the plane off the coast of southwestern Borneo.

But it remained unknown what caused the plane, AirAsia Flight 8501, to plunge into the sea Sunday, less than an hour after taking off from Surabaya bound for Singapore.

Although Indonesian officials did not say so explicitly, their comments Tuesday suggested that it was unlikely that survivors would be found.

"I am so very sorry for this accident," Joko Widodo, Indonesia's president, said before meeting with families of passengers here. "I hope families can stay strong while facing tragedy."

Throughout the afternoon, Indonesian authorities built up an inventory of debris collected by ships and helicopters from the sea surface, including life vests, aircraft parts and what appeared to be a small blue suitcase. Indonesian television showed a rescuer descending from a helicopter toward a corpse, which like other bodies found was not wearing a life jacket.

Search and rescue officials said that three items in particular - the suitcase and parts they identified as an aspirator assembly and a reservoir slide craft - helped them determine that the debris came from Flight 8501.

Indonesian authorities said the pieces of wreckage were found about 60 miles southeast of the last known position of the plane - the opposite direction from the plane's path, a fact that was not explained.

Search teams also spotted what they said might be a larger submerged piece of the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which was operated by the Indonesian affiliate of AirAsia.

"My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ 8501," Tony Fernandes, the head of AirAsia, wrote in a Twitter message soon after the debris was discovered. "On behalf of AirAsia my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am."

Fernandes said later that he did not want to speculate about the cause of the disaster until the plane's flight data recorders were recovered and analyzed, though he noted that "bad weather is the short-term conclusion - weather in Southeast Asia is bad now."

As news spread of the grim discoveries in the sea, some relatives of passengers stood despondently outside the airport in Surabaya.

"I'm still hoping my brother is safe," said Ifan Joko, standing in a light drizzle outside the terminal where relatives and friends had gathered since Sunday.

His  brother, Charly Gunawan, who was traveling to Singapore to spend the New Year's holiday, was among the 162 people onboard.

"If the passengers are dead, I want the bodies brought back to Surabaya," Ifan said. "I will pay the bill myself if I have to."

The crash was a particular loss to Surabaya's ethnic Chinese community. Flights from Surabaya to Singapore serve as shuttles for residents here who do business in Singapore or have family members there. The air disaster seems to have also disproportionately affected Surabaya's Christian community.

Leaders of Bethany, a massive, three-story megachurch in a wealthy neighborhood on the outskirts of Surabaya, pored over the plane's manifest when it became available Sunday and determined that at least five passengers were members of families who attend the church.

Deddy, one of the church pastors, said the crash was a tragedy for all of Indonesia. But, he said, "We can guess from the names that many are Christian and Chinese."

If passengers from both the AirAsia plane and the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in March are included in the calculations, 1,320 people died in air accidents in 2014, the deadliest year since 2005, according to the Bureau of Aircraft Incidents Archives, an organization that tracks aviation accidents.

But the number of fatalities this year has been heavily skewed by the AirAsia crash and two Malaysia Airlines disasters - another of the airline's jets was shot down over Ukraine in July with 298 people aboard - which taken together made up 60 percent of all aviation deaths in 2014.

Overall, advances in aviation safety remain encouraging - the number of airline crashes has been on a downward trend for several decades. There were 111 crashes in 2014, and by this measure it was the safest year since 1927 - a remarkable decline given the exponential growth in air traffic.

The two-day delay in locating the AirAsia wreckage, however, seems likely to add to pressure on airlines to equip their aircraft with devices that send out location coordinates and other diagnostic information.

Miles Gerety, an attorney in Connecticut, said calls for more data streaming from aircraft have been around since at least 1998, when a Swissair flight crashed on its way to Geneva from New York and some data was lost from the black box onboard.

Gerety, whose brother died on the Swissair flight, recently sailed across the Atlantic on a 35-foot boat and used a device that regularly transmitted his position.

"The technology to update a vessel's position every minute, 30 seconds or even one second is readily available and cheap," he said by email.