"Thank God," Budiono said. "This is good news for investigators to reveal the cause of the plane crash."
Divers found the cockpit voice recorder, which holds two hours of conversations between the pilot, co-pilot, crew and air traffic control, just hours after the retrieval of the flight data recorder from under a wing Monday, said Suryadi Supriyadi, operation coordinator at the national search and rescue agency. The voice recorder was wedged under heavy pieces of wreckage nearby.
Supriyadi said that initial findings suggest the jet may have exploded on impact with the water after plummeting more than 30,000 feet.
The recovery of the black boxes is key to determining what caused the Dec. 28 crash of the Airbus A320 less than an hour into its scheduled two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Authorities have said it could take weeks to download all the information the boxes provide.
"There`s like 200-plus parameters they record," said aviation safety expert John Goglia, a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board member. "It`s going to provide us an ocean of material."
Indonesian weather service officials have tentatively blamed storms for the crash of Flight 8501. Minutes before the jet disappeared from radar, the pilot had sought permission to increase altitude because of poor weather conditions. Air-traffic controllers rejected the request because of the high volume of traffic.
The search for the plane, bodies and black boxes were hamstrung by chronic storms, high winds and cloudy seas. Underwater searchers began to hone in on the black boxes after hearing pings from the devices Sunday, but their efforts 100 feet beneath the surface were thwarted by murky conditions and heavy currents.
On Sunday divers confirmed a large piece of debris detected by sonar was a wing and pieces from the engine.
On Saturday, the tail of the plane was lifted from the seafloor and taken to Pangkalan Bun, the nearest town, to be handed over to Indonesia`s National Transportation Safety Committee for investigation, the airline said in a statement.
Rescue officials said 48 bodies have been recovered as of Monday. AirAsia said 32 of the remains have been identified.
The Indonesian Transport Ministry has said AirAsia did not have a license to fly the route on the day of the crash, a claim AirAsia has vigorously disputed. The airline has been banned from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route. The Transport Ministry has suspended scores of routes from other domestic airlines for similar alleged violations.
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