PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia. Jan. 1 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia's Search and Rescue vessel KN SAR Purworejo tasked to deploy navy divers to the crash site of the AirAsia plane in Java Sea suspended operation due to bad weather, the captain of the ship said Thursday.
"With heavy rains and wind like this strong, the wave in the crash site may rise up to 4 meters, exacerbate the visibility of the crews. It is not possible for us to go in such a bad weather condition," Captain of the Indonesian SAR vessel Adi Triyanto told Xinhua in the cockpit of the vessel on Thursday. The vessel was docked in Kumai seaport, Pangkalan Bun.
He added that the vessel can only go through up to 3 meters, and higher than that would risk the safety of the crew.
Adil said that the SAR vessel operated by 17 crews was tasked to usher a total of 47 divers who come from three special diver forces in the Navy code-named Frog Troops, Denjaka and Taifib.
Location of the area to search bodies and debris from the AirAsia Airbus A320-200 plane was four hours away from Kumai seaport, or 100 nautical mile, Adil added.
The divers arrived in the command post to retrieve victims and debris of the ill-fated plane which crashed in Indonesian waters on Sunday morning.
Debris and bodies of the plane passengers were spotted on Tuesday after multinational searching efforts commenced since Sunday.
At least seven bodies have been found so far. Those bodies were sent to Surabaya by Indonesia's military cargo plane for further post mortem identification before being delivered to families.
The retrieval of debris and bodies to the shore has been facing major obstacles due to bad weather conditions in the crash site.
The ill-fated Singapore-bound AirAsia QZ8501 flight that departed from Indonesia's Surabaya carried 155 passengers and seven crews.
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