One of crashed AirAsia flight's black boxes retrieved, other located

After days of search, Indonesian navy divers have finally succeeded in retrieving the flight data recorder (FDR) of the crashed AirAsia Flight QZ8501 in the Java Sea, shedding light on determining the cause of the fatal crash with 162 people onboard.

This breakthrough in the ongoing search was made after several failed attempts to find the crucial device for investigation, including the attempt to lift the tail section of the plane from the bottom of the sea.

"The flight data recorder has been evacuated," Bambang Soelistyo, chief of Indonesia National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS), told a press conference, adding that the black box was discovered under the wing of the ill-fated Airbus 320-200.

The other black box on the plane -- the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) -- has also been located in the afternoon, but not retrieved yet, he said.

There are usually two kinds of black boxes on the plane, the FDR and the CVR, which can give a testimony, narrating the flight history with accuracy and impartiality, to assist in investigation of the plane.

The search for the black boxes of the crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 has undergone through several unexpected twists in the past several days.

Still haunted by the long and futile search of Flight MH370 which mysteriously vanished in last March, the crash of QZ8501 a fortnight ago, with the deaths of all the 162 people aboard, has dealt another bitter blow to the already battered aviation industry in this region.

So, people were naturally excited when the tail section of AirAsia flight QZ8501 was hoisted from the Java Sea off Indonesia's Central Kalimantan coast on Saturday.

General Moeldoko, an Indonesian military commander, told the media, shortly after the tail of the ill-fated plane was lifted from sea, that he believed the black boxes, which were stored in the rear part of the AirAsia plane, were still in their places.

But that hope was dashed as no black box was found in the retrieved wreckage.

"It's not in the tail anymore, already split out from the tail," Suryadi B. Supriyadi, director of the search operation, told a press conference on Saturday.

On Sunday, three Indonesian ships again detected signals possibly emitted from the crashed plane near an area where an object believed to be the fuselage of the plane was located, but murky water and strong currents kept the divers from seeing them.

Officials said that the three Indonesian ships all detected the ping signals from the same source strongly suspected to be the black boxes of the AirAsia plane.

On Monday, weather reports said conditions were favorable for search efforts in the morning, but could turn poor in the afternoon. So, the divers began diving very early in the morning to take advantage of the favorable weather condition, and successfully retrieved the FDR.

AirAsia flight QZ8501 downed in Indonesia's Java Sea near the Karimata Strait during its flight from Surabaya to Singapore on Dec. 28.

So far, 48 bodies of the 162 people onboard have been recovered by searchers through a multinational operation, and 27 have been identified by the Indonesian police's disaster victims identification unit.