AirAsia tragedy: 5th object found from jet crash, says Indonesia rescue chief

Jakarta: Indonesia search and rescue teams hunting for the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet have located a fifth large object on the seabed, agency chief Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo told reporters on Sunday.

The Indonesia AirAsia Airbus AIR.PA A320-200 plunged into the Java Sea one week ago while en route from Indonesia's second-biggest city Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board. No survivors have been found.

Bad weather was again hindering the search teams with diving suspended, said Soelistyo, adding that 31 bodies of the mostly Indonesian passengers and crew now having been recovered.

Earlier, recovery teams had found two big parts of the AirAsia Flight 8501. Search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo told reporters that the huge relief operation came across the objects in the Java Sea off the island of Borneo late on Friday night.

"With the discovery of an oil spill and two big parts of the aircraft, I can assure you these are the parts of the AirAsia plane we have been looking for," Soelistyo told reporters in the capital Jakarta.

He said the larger of the objects was around 10 metres by five metres (32 feet by 16 feet).

He added however that a strong current was making it difficult to operate the ROV.

Rough weather in recent days has hampered the search for bodies and the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which disappeared from radar and crashed into the sea during a storm.

So far 30 bodies have been recovered in the search, which had been narrowed Friday to an area of 1,575 square nautical miles -- a tenth of the size of Thursday's search -- with 29 ships and 17 aircraft engaged in the operation.

Finding the plane's black boxes is crucial to determining the cause of the crash.