Audio recordings from the cockpit of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 contain no sounds of gunfire or explosions, making it unlikely the plane was brought down by terrorism, Indonesian investigators say.
The aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder, which captures all noises on the flight deck, was recovered last week from the depths of the Java Sea, along with the other so-called black box, the flight data recorder.
“The voice from the cockpit does not show any sign of a terrorist attack. It is only the pilot, sounding very busy,” Andreas Hananto, an investigator at Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, said in an interview with the news agency Reuters.
–
“The divers couldn’t even reach the bottom, which hampered our operation,” Supriyadi, an operations coordinator for Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told reporters.
They did managed to recover a few bits of debris from the area, including passenger windows and seats, AirAsia said in a statement.
Search officials have said they are considering using giant balloons to lift the roughly 100-foot-long fuselage from the seafloor to the surface, as they did with the tail section of the aircraft earlier this month.
