AirAsia Flight 8501 Plane Crash Update: Co-Pilot's Body Discovered Still Buckled to Seat
In the latest AirAsia Flight 8501 plane crash update, body of one of the pilots, still buckled to his seat, has been recovered. With this the count of dead bodies recovered has been brought to 101, an official confirmed.
Bambang Soelistyo, head of the national search agency, told The Wall Street Journal that searchers found the body of one of the two pilots of the Airbus A320 on Friday, but that an identification team had yet to confirm whether it was the Indonesian pilot or the co-pilot. The co-pilot, a French national, had been flying when the jet crashed en route to Singapore from the Indonesian city of Surabaya Dec. 28.
According to the report, the body was found in the cockpit about 20 meters from the aircraft's fuselage, which is sitting in about 100 feet of water. Official added that the cockpit was badly damaged without adding any further details.
According to CNN, the police said that 72 out of the 101 bodies retrieved from the site have already been identified and that they're making attempts to also recognize the other victims.
The AirAsia Flight 8501 with 162 people on board took off from Surabaya city in Indonesia but went down in stormy weather and into the Java sea on December 28.
Reportedly, according to the team investigating the crash of the AirAsia Flight 8501, the computer had malfunctioned and instead just resetting, the pilot opted to disconnect the device from the circuit breaker found behind the co-pilot.
