New | ‘Don’t blame my father,’ AirAsia captain’s daughter pleads as search for crashed plane widens
“He is just a victim and has not been found yet. My family is now mourning,” said Angela Anggi Ranastianis, daughter of Indonesia AirAsia pilot Captain Iriyanto.
The daughter of AirAsia flight QZ8501's captain made a televised plea urging people not to blame her father over the tragedy, as searchers resumed hunting for the wreckage and black boxes that would reveal why the plane crashed.
“He is just a victim and has not been found yet. My family is now mourning,” said Angela Anggi Ranastianis, daughter of Indonesia AirAsia pilot Captain Iriyanto.
“As a daughter, I cannot accept it. No pilot will harm his passengers,” she told TV One. When news broke of the plane's disappearance last month, the girl posted on social media: "Papa, come back. I still need you."
In his last communication, experienced former air force pilot Iriyanto said he wanted to change course to avoid the menacing storm system - then all contact was lost about 40 minutes after take-off.
Indonesian navy divers took advantage of calmer waters today to resume efforts to identify suspected wreckage from the missing AirAsia jet after five large objects were spotted on sonar.
But there was with no signal detected yet from the black box recorders as the search entered its eighth day.
Ships and aircraft seeking debris and bodies from the crashed AirbusA320-200 widened their search area amid strong currents. Helicopters will search coastal areas.
Thirty-four bodies have so far been retrieved from the Java Sea, including some still strapped to their seats, and have been brought to shore in simple, numbered coffins. None of the 162 passengers and crew onboard survived.
Indonesia’s military chief General Moeldoko said today he had offered to take victims’ relatives out to the crash site to pay their respects.
“We will bring them to the navy ships and we will take them to the location to scatter flowers, and I hope coming to the location can reduce their sadness and the feeling of loss,” he told reporters.
The main focus of the search is about 90 nautical miles off the coast of Borneo island, where objects – the largest about 18 metres long and believed to be the fuselage – have been pinpointed in shallow waters by ships using sonar.
“The weather is quite conducive. The visibility is six kilometres, there’s no low cloud, the wind is calm,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jhonson Supriadi said. “With our calculations of currents this strong, every day this operational area is extended.”
The weather has persistently hampered efforts to recover bodies and find the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that should explain why the plane crashed.
Both flight recorders are located near the tail of the Airbus, but it was unclear whether that part of the aircraft was among the debris found on the seabed.
Peter Marosszeky, a senior aviation research fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said the weather was squarely to blame for the delay in finding the black box recorders, which are designed to emit pings that can be detected by sonar for a month after a crash.
“The seas haven’t been very friendly, but the black boxes have a 30-day life and they will be able to find them, particularly in the shallow waters,” he said. “It’s the weather that is causing the delay.”
“If it cannot be done by divers, we will use sophisticated equipment with capabilities of tracking underwater objects and then will lift them up,” said Suryadi B. Supriyadi, Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue director of operations.
Nine ships from four countries have converged on the area, with teams of divers including seven Russian experts standing ready, but strong winds and four-metre high waves have kept progress agonisingly slow.
The crash was the first fatal accident suffered by the AirAsia budget group, whose Indonesian affiliate flies from at least 15 destinations across the sprawling archipelago.
The airline, which is 49 per cent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia, has come under pressure from Indonesian authorities, who have suspended its Surabaya to Singapore operations saying the carrier only had a licence to fly the route on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Indonesia AirAsia said it would co-operate with the transport ministry while it investigates the licence.
However, Singapore’s Civil Aviation Authority said that from its end, the airline had been approved to fly the route daily.
On Sunday, an AirAsia flight scheduled to depart from Surabaya airport turned back when a power unit used to start the plane shut down, emitting a loud bang that terrified passengers,
But AirAsia stressed it was a minor incident and that it was a power, not engine, failure. The plane later landed safely at its destination in West Java after undergoing a check, Indonesia AirAsia chief executive Sunu Widyatmoko said.
