Indonesian divers launch efforts to retrieve AirAsia black boxes

People watch as a section of the tail of AirAsia QZ8501 passenger plane is lifted off a ship and onto the back of a truck, the day after it was lifted from the seabed, in Kumai Port, near Pangkalan Bun, central Kalimantan January 11, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia - Indonesian navy divers took advantage of calm weather in the Java Sea on Monday as they attempted to retrieve the black box flight recorders of an AirAsia airliner that crashed two weeks ago, killing all 162 people on board.

Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on Dec. 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

Search teams at the weekend believed they had found the aircraft's fuselage and that the two black boxes were likely nearby. However, strong winds, currents and high waves on Sunday hampered efforts to reach the suspected wreckage.

Weather officials said conditions were favourable for search efforts on Monday morning but could turn poor in the afternoon, giving divers just a few hours to work.

"(The divers) began diving very early in the morning to take advantage of the weather," Supriyadi, operations coordinator for the National Search and Rescue Agency, told Reuters in the town of Pangkalan Bun, the base for the search effort on Borneo.

Forty-eight bodies have been retrieved from the Java Sea and searchers believe more will be found in the plane's fuselage.

Three vessels involved in the search have detected pings, believed to be from the black boxes, about 4 km (2 miles) from where the plane's tail was raised on Saturday, in water about 30 metres (100 feet) deep.