(Bloomberg) -- Search crews recovering debris and bodies fromthe waters off of Indonesia are poised to intensify their searchfor the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia Bhd plane and the blackboxes that may answer what doomed it.

The cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders are essential topiecing together what happened to Flight 8501 in the six minutesbetween the time the pilot asked the control tower for permissionto deviate from the flight path and when the jet dropped out ofradar contact.

The aircraft went missing on Sunday during a trip from Surabaya,Indonesia, to Singapore with 162 people on board. Tuesday inIndonesia search crews discovered objects including what appears tobe an emergency door as well as submerged items resembling planeparts, F.H. Bambang Sulistyo, head of the national search andrescue agency, said in Jakarta. Two female bodies and one male bodywere retrieved, he said. No mention was made of survivors.

“It wasn’t a controlled ditching,” said Paul Hayes, safetydirector at London-based aviation consulting company AscendWorldwide Ltd. “That’s clear from the finding of bodies that don’thave life jackets on.”

The crash site is in an area around Pangkalan Bun, about 1,000kilometers (620 miles) southeast of Singapore. Water in the area isshallow, at 25 meters to 30 meters deep, and authorities haveprepared divers to search for the data recorders and furtherevidence.

The black boxes of the Airbus Group NV A320 aircraft, which areactually encased in bright orange to facilitate their retrieval,are waterproof, fortified and designed to emit an electronic signalunderwater for 30 days to help searchers find them. So far, nopings have been detected, Indonesia’s Air Force said Tuesday.

Third Incident

It’s the third high-profile incident involving a carrier in Asiathis year, raising safety concerns in one of the fastest-growingaviation markets in the world. AirAsia is the biggest customer byunits of the A320, a workhorse airliner that’s used by hundreds ofcarriers around the world.

“We have 1,000 flights a day and until we have the investigationwe cannot make any assumptions as to what went wrong,” AirAsiafounder and Chief Executive Officer Tony Fernandes said at a pressconference. “All I can say is the weather in Southeast Asia is verybad at the moment.”

The Java Sea covers about 320,000 square kilometers, bordered bythe Indonesian islands of Borneo to the north, Java to thesouth.

“There’s no doubt they’ll recover the data boxes,” said PeterMarosszeky, a former air accident investigator who lectures at theUniversity of New South Wales. “They know when it went down andabout where.”

It took almost two years for investigators to recover the datarecorders from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after an Air Franceplane went down en route from Rio de Janiero to Paris in 2009.

Nothing has been recovered from the Malaysian Airline System Bhdplane that disappeared March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur toBeijing carrying 239 people. As a result, much about that jet’smysterious change of course remains unknown.

Storm Clouds

The AirAsia plane disappeared off radars after the pilotrequested a higher altitude because of storm clouds in the flightpath. The last signal from the plane was between the city ofPontianak on Borneo and Tanjung Pandan.

The black boxes could go a long way in bringing closure tofamilies who wonder what happened and also provide insight to theindustry about what causes accidents and help prompt changingpractices or developing new technologies.

Losing the AirAsia plane caps the worst year for air-passengerfatalities since 2010. The AirAsia pilots didn’t send a distresssignal, drawing comparisons with Malaysia Airline’s Flight 370. Thehunt continues for that plane, the longest search for a passengerjet in modern aviation history.

--With assistance from Andrew Janes and Fathiya Dahrul inJakarta, Herdaru Purnomo in Surabaya and Anurag Kotoky in NewDelhi.

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