Black box signals believed from crashed AirAsia plane detected again

JAKARTA (Xinhua) - Three Indonesian ships detected signals possibly from crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 again near where the tail section of the plane was hoisted from the seabed, an Indonesian official said on Sunday.

Operational director of the National Search and Rescue Agency Suryadi B. Supriyadi said the pings were detected 1 km east of the location, where the broken tail was lifted from the sea off Indonesia's Central Kalimantan coast on Saturday.

Divers will be deployed to check the signals, Supriyadi, who is at an operation base in Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan, was quoted as saying by local media.

He also said the wreckage of the plane's tail was estimated to arrive in the Kumai port in Pangkalan Bun, the closest to the crash site at noon.

Ping signals possibly from black boxes of the Airbus A320-200 were detected by Indonesian search ships on Friday, some 300 meters from the location where the tail was discovered. But they have not been confirmed.

The flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as black boxes, are crucial to helping determine the cause of the air crash. The devices, which are stored in the rear of the aircraft, can still send signals for two weeks before the battery goes dead.  

Flight QZ8501, with 162 people aboard, went down in the Java Sea near the Karimata Strait during its flight from Surabaya to Singapore on Dec. 28.

A multinational search operation was underway to retrieve wreckage and bodies of the victims, joined by ships and planes from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Japan, Australia, Russia, South Korea and China.  

So far, 48 bodies have been recovered from the sea, with 27 of them having been identified.