Bad weather hinders efforts to find Flight 8501

Searchers were unable to recover any more bodies on Thursday as heavy rain and wind kept helicopters on the ground and divers out of the waters of the Java Sea.

The main focus of the search, when weather allows its resumption, is to be the area off of Borneo Island where a search-and-rescue pilot spotted a "shadow" in the sea that investigators believe could be the bulk of the wreck of the Airbus A320-200.

Indonesian search officials said on Thursday that they would deploy a research ship equipped with a black box locator to the area.

"The main thing is to find the main area of the wreckage and the black box," Toos Sanitioso, of Indonesia's National Committee for Transportation Safety, told reporters.

The black box, containing the cockpit voice recorder and technical data recorder, is seen as crucial to determining the cause of the crash.

AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes used his Twitter account to express the hope that investigators were close to finding the black box.

Another official cautioned that while they were working on the theory that this is where the wreckage of Flight 8501 came to rest, it was still too early to say for sure.

"This is very difficult, even with sophisticated equipment. With weather like this, who knows," Edi Tirkayasa, the commander of divers waiting for the weather to clear, told the Reuters news agency.

Just eight bodies have been recovered so far and rescuers have found no survivors. One investigator said it was possible that the bulk of the victims were in the fuselage of the ill-fated plane on the seabed.

The plane was carrying 162 passengers and crew members when it disappeared from the radar screens of air traffic controllers around 45 minutes into a flight from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore on Sunday. Most of the people on board were Indonesian nationals.

pfd/nm (AP, Reuters, dpa)