WSJ article with some updates: Bodies found in wreckage, impact injuries found, pathologist(s) requested analysis of lung contents, autopsies being done on foreigners.
AirAsia Flight 8501: Official Says Black Boxes May Not Be in Tail Section - WSJ
Excerpt:
Search teams on Friday also
recovered the bodies of two victims still in their airplane seats from the tail section, bringing the total number of recovered bodies to 48. The two bodies were the only ones to be found so far in the wreckage.
Autopsies carried out on several victims from AirAsia Flight 8501 have revealed impact injuries such as broken legs, but no burns, early clues that may help investigators figure out what happened in the crash.
Air-safety experts said that means there likely wasn’t any fire or explosion that tore through the plane on its way down, and the jet probably hit the water at a shallow angle.
“It was most likely a flat impact,” according to Michael Barr, a senior accident-investigations instructor at the University of Southern California. Based on four decades of experience, Mr. Barr said, “the flatter the impact, the less trauma damage to the body.”
The impact of a vertical or near-vertical descent, according to Mr. Barr and other experts, probably would result in the plane breaking into smaller pieces than the wreckage suspected of being on the bottom. The broken legs of victims are more consistent with a scenario of a plane pancaking into the water, Mr. Barr said, which likely would have resulted in the fuselage or seat assemblies buckling or breaking apart. That, in turn, could transfer huge stresses to the limbs of passengers strapped in their seats.
Lung samples from the first few autopsies have been sent to an Indonesian laboratory for signs of seawater and plankton
following a request from pathologists, said Budiyono, the commander of East Java’s disaster-victims identification service, who goes by only one name.
“If there’s sea water or plankton in their lungs, then we can say that they were still alive when the plane crashed into the sea,” he said.
Pathologists have been able to speed up their investigation after more bodies have been recovered during the past few days.
They are focusing on trying to conduct post mortems on foreigners who don’t have the same cultural sensitivities to the procedures as many Indonesians, Mr. Budiyono said. Indonesian authorities have decided to conduct autopsies on all foreigners recovered from the crash, unless families expressly reject the procedures.