Indonesian officials find wreckage

Officials said on Wednesday that rescuers had located what they believed to be the wreck of AirAsia flight QZ8501 beneath the sea, at a spot where bodies and debris had been found on Tuesday.

"It's about 30 to 50 metres (100 to 165 feet) underwater," said Hernanto, the head of the search and rescue agency in Surabaya, where the plane had taken off on Sunday.

"We are praying it is the plane so the evacuation can be done quickly," Hernanto added.

The authorities in Surabaya were preparing to receive and identify bodies from the Airbus A320-200, which was carrying 162 people when it disappeared from the radar screens of air-traffic controllers around 45 minutes into a flight from the Indonesian city to Singapore.

Relatives of the people on board the flight were providing DNA samples to help officials identify the bodies, some of which have already been plucked from the sea.

Wreckage first spotted on Tuesday

Officials said what they believed to be the wreck of the plane had been detected by sonar, a day after the crew of an Indonesian air force plane first reported spotting it.

"At 12:50 (Tuesday, local time) the air force Hercules found an object described as a shadow at the bottom of the sea in the form of a plane," the head of Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, Bambang Soelistyo said.

The search effort has been hampered by rough weather in the region, which had also caused the crew of flight QZ8501 to request permission to ascend to a higher flight path, a request which was initially denied by air traffic controllers due to the danger of collision with another aircraft. When air traffic control attempted to contact the crew shortly afterwards to grant the request, the plane had already disappeared from the radar.

Mainly Indonesians on board

AirAsia gave the nationalities of those on board as 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans and one each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain, as well as the co-pilot, a French national.

AirAsia Indonesia is a unit of Malaysia-based AirAsia, which dominates the regional market for low-cost air travel and until now had never suffered a fatal accident.

pfd/tj (Reuters, AFP, AP)