AirAsia QZ8501 underwater search to begin

A French crash investigation team will use sensitive acoustic detection devices to try locate the plane's "black box" flight recorder. The Airbus A320-200 was flying from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore with 162 people on board when it vanished, BBC News reports. No survivors have been found and the cause of the crash remains unknown. So far only 10 bodies have been found and brought ashore, with the search operation repeatedly held up by bad weather and rough seas. One person has been identified as passenger Hayati Lutfiah Hamid - her funeral was held in Surabaya on Sunday. The plane is almost certainly at the bottom of the Java Sea - several pieces of debris have been recovered but despite a massive five-day search the fuselage is still missing. Officials say most of the passengers could still be inside. The BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta says the hope is that the French-led team will have better luck than existing searchers in locating the "pings" emitted by the so-called black box. This will help them locate the plane and, once retrieved, try to find answers as to what happened to it. The head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, Bambang Soelistyo, said on Friday that wreckage and bodies are spread over a 5km area of the Java Sea off Borneo. Read more