SURABAYA: A passenger aboard the crashed AirAsia flight took a photo inside the plane and sent it to a friend just minutes before takeoff, according to NBC News.
The image shows Hendra Gunawan, a 23-year-old Indonesian, and three friends as they prepared to fly from the city of Surabaya to Singapore on Sunday for a vacation. The image was sent to a friend and later passed along to Gunawan’s father, Yosef Samara.
Speaking to NBC News in Surabaya on Thursday, Samara described his son as “a cheerful guy” and “a hard-working … easy going person.”
Looking to what was likely the last photo of his son, he said he had to “face the fact that this airplane has crashed.” Rescuers have recovered some bodies among debris confirmed as coming from Flight QZ8501 in the Java Sea off Borneo. Bad weather has hampered efforts to investigate an object believed to be the wreckage aircraft on the seabed.
Family members of those aboard a downed AirAsia passenger jet were coming to grips with the fact that their loved ones did not survive, as efforts to recover the bodies have been hampered by bad weather.
Five days into the search for victims of a downed AirAsia jetliner, only nine bodies have been recovered. Authorities leading the search effort and a leading aviation expert suspect that is because most of the passengers remain in the plane’s fuselage.
Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas in Australia told The Associated Press there’s a good chance the plane hit the water largely intact, and that many passengers remain inside it.
He added that bodies recovered so far would have come out of a breach in the fuselage.
“But most passengers still should have had their seat belts on, particularly as the plane was going into weather,” Thomas said. “The captain would have still had the seat belt sign on.”
Heavy wind and rain hampered search efforts Thursday. Searchers have located a large dark shadow on the seabed that officials say could be the wreckage of the aircraft. France’s crash investigation agency has sent a team with expertise in searching for and recovering black boxes to aid in the search, Reuters reported.
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