Hunt for missing AirAsia plane finds possible tail part

A piece of large debris their ship has found "has a high possibility of being the tail of the plane," Indonesian navy officer Yayan Sofyan told a press conference Monday in Surabaya, where the ill-fated plane had taken off before it lost contact with air traffic control on Dec. 28. It was not immediately clear if the piece he referred to was among the five large objects found earlier. On a separate occasion in Jakarta, the head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo released similar information, but in a much more cautious tone. "I am not saying it's the tail yet...That is suspected. Now we are trying to confirm it." Rescuers are facing an uphill task to find the all-important black boxes, the crucial flight data recorders, as the search mission was constantly disrupted by rough weather in the search area. And as time goes without finding the "black boxes", the mystery surrounding what many feared was a crash will remain, Xinhua reports. "We are racing against time as their battery would use up within 30 days. Now we have 21 more days left," an investigator with the Indonesian National Transportation Agency (KNKT) who called himself Nurcahyo told Xinhua. Despite unfavorable weather conditions, relief workers retrieved three more bodies, bringing to 37 the total number of bodies found in the search operation. The three bodies were rushed to state-run Imanuddin hospital in downtown Pangkalan Bun for brief identification before being transferred to Surabaya. Some 260 medical workers from both inside and outside Indonesia are working to identify the bodies using finger prints, dental records and bone DNA. Read more