PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia — Divers and an unmanned underwater vehicle spotted the tail of the missing AirAsia plane in the Java Sea on Wednesday, the first confirmed sighting of any major wreckage 11 days after Flight 8501 disappeared with 162 people on board, an official said.
Powerful currents and murky water continue to hinder the operation, but searchers managed to get a photograph of the debris — about 9 kilometers (nearly 6 miles) from where the plane lost contact — after it was detected by an Indonesian survey ship, National Search and Rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo told reporters.
One released image appeared to show an upside down “A” painted on a piece of metal, while another grainy shot depicted some sort of mechanical parts.
The find is particularly important because the all-important cockpit voice and flight data recorders, or black boxes, are located in the aircraft’s tail. Smaller pieces of the plane, such as seats and an emergency door, had previously been collected from the surface, and six other several large objects have been detected by sonar on the sea bed in the same area.
“Today we successfully discovered the part of the plane that became the main aim since yesterday,” Soelistyo said. “I can ensure that this is part of the tail with the AirAsia mark on it.”