Divers recover AirAsia 'black box'

Indonesian navy divers retrieved the black box flight data recorder from the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet on Monday, a major step towards unraveling the cause of the crash that killed all 162 people on board.

But there was confusion about what happened in the final moments of Flight QZ8501, which crashed off the Indonesian coast on Dec. 28, with one official saying the plane probably exploded before hitting the water and another disputing that theory.

The Airbus A320-200 airliner lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore.

"At 7:11, we succeeded in lifting the part of the black box known as the flight data recorder," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters at a news conference.

The second so-called black box, containing the cockpit voice recorder, is located about 20 meters away from where the flight data recorder was found, but divers have not yet been able to get to it.

"(The cockpit voice recorder) seems to be under a wing, which is quite heavy," said Supriyadi, operations coordinator for the search and rescue agency. "So we will use air bags to lift it. This will be done tomorrow."

The black boxes contain a wealth of data that will be crucial for investigators piecing together the sequence of events that led to the airliner plunging into the sea.