Possible debris from AirAsia jet spotted

News agencies on Tuesday cited different Indonesian officials, all of whom said that debris sighted off the coast of Borneo Island was likely part of an AirAsia Airbus A320-200, which went missing from air traffic controllers' radar on Sunday.

"The debris is red and white," Djoko Murjatmodjo, the acting director general of air transportation at the transportation ministry, was cited as saying by the DPA news agency. "We are checking if it's debris from the aircraft. It's probably from the body of the aircraft."

A spokesman for the Indonesia National Search and Rescue Agency confirmed this, saying that one of the objects appeared to be a life jacket.

"This is the most significant finding," Yusuf Latif told the Associated Press, "but we cannot confirm anything until the investigation is completed.

"There are about 10 small and big objects," local Indonesian air force commander Dwi Putranto was quoted as saying by the news website Detik.com. "One looks like a yellow tank, another looks like an emergency slide, but we can't tell for sure."

Both DPA and AP also cited unnamed sources, who said aircraft searching the area where the plane is thought to have gone down had sighted what appeared to be several bodies.

Request to divert due to bad weather

AirAsia flight QZ8501, carrying 162 people on board, was en route from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore when it disappeared from radar screens early on Sunday, shortly after the pilots had requested permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather. The request was initially refused due to heavy air traffic, officials said. When air traffic controllers tried to grant the request shortly afterwards, the plane had already disappeared from the radar.

AirAsia gave the nationalities of those on board the A320 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 - at least until now, had never suffered a fatal accident.

The apparent crash comes near the end of a disastrous year for Malaysian air travel.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 239 people on board disappeared while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March and has yet to be found. In July, flight MH17 disappeared while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur - likely having been shot down - over an area controlled by pro-Russia separatists.

pfd/rg (dpa, Reuters, AP)