Caskets containing the remains of AirAsia QZ8501 passengers recovered from the sea are carried to a military transport plane before being transported to Surabaya, where the flight originated, at the airport in Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan January 2, 2015. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside
JAKARTA -- Search and rescue teams have located two "big objects" in the Java Sea believed to be from an AirAsia passenger plane, an Indonesian official said.
Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo told reporters the two objects were about 90 feet underwater, according to Reuters. The search and rescue agency was attempting to get images using remotely operated underwater vehicles, he said.
Soelistyo said the first object measures 30 feet by 15 feet by 1.3 feet, while the second is 24 feet by 1.6 feet. Divers are also attempting to reach the items.
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CBS Evening News
Most bodies still unaccounted for from AirAsia Flight 8510
The search for AirAsia Flight 8501 shifted east to a smaller portion of the Java Sea. The A-320 went down last Sunday and so far 30 bodies have b...
Rough weather is hampering the effort to find wreckage of the Airbus A320, which was carrying 162 passengers and crew when it went down Sunday, halfway through a flight from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, to Singapore.
The bodies of 30 victims have been recovered, 21 of them on Friday. Some of the passengers were still strapped into their airplane seats.
Vessels from the United States and three other countries are scouring the ocean floor, trying to find victims, debris and the plane's black boxes, as helicopters and planes search from the air.
It remains unclear what caused the plane to plunge into the sea. Minutes before losing contact, the pilot told air-traffic control he was approaching threatening clouds, but was denied permission to climb to a higher altitude because of heavy air traffic.
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CBS Evening News
Black boxes key to mystery of AirAsia crash
With the discovery of the wreckage, investigators are one step closer to determining the cause of the accident that killed all the passengers on ...
CBS News' Allen Pizzey reports that investigators are working on the principle that the pilots attempted a steep climb anyway, to avoid the weather, which could have stalled the jet's engines.
The flight data recorder contains crucial information like engine temperature and vertical and horizontal speed; the voice recorder saves conversations between pilots and other sounds coming from inside the cockpit.
When the black boxes are found, Pizzey reports they will be taken to Indonesia where government officials will decipher the data, and they've promised to make their findings public within three months of retrieving the boxes.
Toos Saniotoso, an Indonesian air safety investigator, said investigators "are looking at every aspect" as they try to determine why the plane crashed. "From the operational side, the human factor, the technical side, the ATC (air-traffic control) -- everything is valuable to us."
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