After days of untiring and intensive scouring by search and rescue teams over a vast area of sea and rugged landscapes, and covering ever wider areas, finally the first sign of a possible plane fuselage was reported caught on sonar by Indonesia’s Navy ship KRI Fatahillah. At the ocean floor in the deep Makassar Straits, the ship had detected three large pieces of metal objects off Mamuju in West Sulawesi, at a depth of between 1,000 to 1,500 meters below sea level. However, the ship’s sonar was not able to identify whether these chunks were indeed parts of the missing plane. Subsequent help in the form of more sophisticated equipment came from the US Navy Ship Mary Sears, but the depth of the sea was such, that even these more technologically advanced equipment on the US ship could not reach this depth. The United States then sent the more advanced “hydrophone” to arrive here on Tuesday, 16 January, while Singapore added more advanced “towed pinger locator” (TPL) to receive signals from the underwater locator beacon (ULB) attached to a plane’s data flight recorder or black box.  


Last week on Wednesday, 10 January, the first real breakthrough came when a fisherman named Bakri reported that a strange foreign metal object was caught in his fish trap on the shores of the village of Barru, South Sulawesi, some 300 meters away from the beach.  When police and officials rushed to the scene and transported this finding to Makassar, authorities confirmed that the piece of metal was indeed the tail horizontal stabilizer of the missing aircraft, which was confirmed by the number visible on the stabilizer that matched precisely the spare-part number in the Boeing catalogue.   

The following days, more than 100 pieces of metal and other aircraft debris drifted in and were found on the beaches between towns of Barru and Parepare along the western shore of South Sulawesi, located south of the towns of Majene and Mamuju. Head of the Makassar Airport and Chief of the Search Mission, Air Force Marshall Eddy Suyanto confirmed that these included life jackets, cushion’s rubber foam, the aircraft trim elevator, parts of its wings, and mangled food trays. However, not all pieces found were confirmed as having originated from the missing Adam Air plane.  

Nonetheless, the most important part of the aircraft, -  its fuselage where the passengers could be found, was still undetected.  By now, the search had been intensified to find the plane’s black box or data flight recorder in the sea,  that could explain what had actually happened to the ill-fated aircraft in the last 30 minutes of its flight. The battery of the black box is said to be able to last 30 days only, which allows searchers a window of two short weeks only to find it.