Search teams find 'large objects' in hunt for missing AirAsia jet

Ships searching for the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet that crashed with 162 people on board have pinpointed four “large objects" on the sea floor, Indonesian officials said Saturday.

The biggest piece, measuring 59 feet long and 18 feet wide, appeared to be part of the jet's body, said Henry Bambang Soelistyo, chief of the National Search and Rescue Agency.

The breakthrough came as authorities said that Indonesia AirAsia may have violated the terms of its license for the Surabaya to Singapore route by flying on a Sunday, the day the Airbus A320-200 plunged into the Java Sea. Indonesian air transport authorities announced they would investigate all of the carrier's schedules.

A multi-national task force of ships, planes and helicopters have been scouring the northern Java Sea and coastline of southern Borneo to recover the bodies of victims and locate the wreck of Flight QZ8501 and its black box flight recorders.

"We've found four big parts from the plane we're looking for," Soelistyo told reporters in Jakarta. He added that the huge relief operation came across the objects in the Java Sea off the island of Borneo late on Friday night.

"With the discovery of an oil spill and two big parts of the aircraft, I can assure you these are the parts of the AirAsia plane we have been looking for," Soelistyo said.

"As I speak we are lowering an ROV [remotely operated underwater vehicle] underwater to get an actual picture of the objects detected on the sea floor. All are at the depth of 30 meters.”

Soelistyo said that a strong current was making it difficult to operate the ROV.

Rough weather in recent days has hampered the search for bodies and the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which disappeared from radar and crashed into the sea during a storm.

So far 30 bodies have been recovered in the search, which had been narrowed on Friday to an area of 1,575 square nautical miles — a tenth of the size of Thursday's search — with 29 ships and 17 aircraft engaged in the operation.

To date only small pieces of the aircraft, along with other debris has been found in the operation. There has been no sign of the crucial voice and flight data recorders — the so-called black boxes that investigators hope will unravel the sequence of events in the cockpit during the doomed jet's final minutes.

The Airbus A320 carrying 162 passengers and crew crashed last Sunday, halfway into a two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, to Singapore. Minutes before losing contact, the pilot told air traffic control he was approaching threatening clouds. He was denied permission to climb to a higher altitude because of heavy air traffic.

It remains unclear what caused the plane to plunge into the Java Sea.

Meanwhile, authorities in Jakarta suggested that AirAsia had been violating the terms of its license for the Surabaya to Singapore route by flying on a Sunday.

Djoko Murdjatmodjo, acting director general of air transportation, said on Saturday that the transport ministry would investigate all AirAsia schedules.

"We are going to investigate all AirAsia flight schedules. Hopefully we can start on next Monday. We won't focus on licenses, just schedules," he said. "It is possible AirAsia's license in Indonesia might be revoked," he added, stressing that was only one possibility.

Sunu Widyatmoko, Indonesia AirAsia chief, told reporters the airline, 49-percent owned by Malaysia-based AirAsia, would cooperate with the inquiry.

"The government has suspended our flights from Surabaya to Singapore and back," he said. "They are doing the evaluation process. AirAsia will cooperate fully with the evaluation."

Al Jazeera and wire services