Black box recovered from doomed AirAsia flight

The US navy searches for AirAsia Flight 8501 in the Java Sea. Photo / AP

Divers have retrieved a black box from the crashed AirAsia flight from the bottom of the Java Sea, officials say.

Searchers have been looking for the device, which could hold clues to the aircraft's fate, since the plane crashed two weeks ago.

Earlier, officials said three Indonesian ships had detected intense ping signals about 3.5km from where the aircraft's rear was discovered.

"The two are close to each other, just about 20 metres," Indonesia's coordinating minister for maritime affairs, Indroyono Soesilo, told reporters.

"Hopefully, they are the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder."

Officials said earlier on Sunday that two separate pings had been detected.

The black boxes detached from the Airbus A320's tail when the plane plummeted in to the sea on December 28, killing all 162 people on board.

The recorders are key to understanding what caused the aircraft to go down.

So far, searchers have recovered 48 corpses from the crashed plane. Sixteen recovered corpses remain unidentified, partially due to decomposition.

The bodies of most of the victims, who were mainly Indonesian, are widely believed to be in the plane's fuselage, which has not yet been recovered.

The last contact the pilots had with air traffic control, about halfway into their two-hour journey from Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, to Singapore, indicated they were entering stormy weather.

They asked to climb from 32,000ft to 38,000ft to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied permission because of heavy air traffic.

Four minutes later, the plane dropped off the radar. No distress signal was issued.

- AP