Aboard the USS Fort Worth: One vessel's search for QZ8501

ON BOARD THE USS FORT WORTH: The middle of the Java Sea is where the AirAsia flight QZ8501 lies in fragments and where all the secrets of its fatal demise wait to be slowly revealed.

Search teams have made critical breakthroughs, including locating the aircraft's black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders on Monday, Jan 12. The crew on board the United States naval vessel USS Fort Worth - as of Monday night located just 1.5 nautical miles away from where the mangled tail of the Airbus A320-200 was salvaged - is just one of the many groups of experts in a multinational effort to look for answers.

Under instruction from Indonesia's search and rescue agency BASARNAS, they are to scour large areas of the sea for debris and victims' bodies.

"The coordination with the Indonesian government has been top-notch, said USS Fort Worth Commanding Officer Kendall Bridgewater. They've been very good, telling us where they'd like us to search and providing that focused effort to basically rule out or verify that there's a part of the flight in the area."

They have been scanning the seafloor using a pinger locator and a range of underwater sonar technology, deployed from a small rigid boat known as a "rib".

"Most of what Fort Worth has been tasked to do is to investigate objects that have been picked up by potentially larger sonar equipment and either confirm or deny that they originated from the flight, said Lieutenant John Kennedy from the Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit. So the team has been able to rule out several items of significance so other countries involved in the search don't need to retrace those steps."

The USS Fort Worth is a sophisticated addition to the US 7th Fleet - a force that patrols the largest expanse of water on Earth, including operations in the South China Sea. It is an agile, manoeuvrable and heavily-armed vessel that uses Singapore as a hub to conduct maintenance and resupply.

While the sonar scanners have not located any flight wreckage, the ship's on-board helicopter, an MH-60 Seahawk, has proven its value, having been instrumental in recovering the remains of three victims. "We were able to mark those bodies with some smoke markers and stay on top to make sure those bodies were properly recovered," said Naval Air Crewman Jason Weideman.

The crew on board the USS Fort Worth do not know when they will end their operation. They say they will continue for as long as they are asked or as long as it takes, proof of the multinational commitment to bringing closure to the families of the victims of this disaster.

With the black box now found, and strong indications about the location of the plane's fuselage, those families are that much closer to closing this chapter of uncertainty.

Originally posted here:
Aboard the USS Fort Worth: One vessel's search for QZ8501