UPDATE: AirAsia flight QZ8501 was not supposed to fly that route.

Update:

In a move likely to have legal implications for the airline and bring no comfort to the families of the victims, the Guardian says the Indonesian transport ministry has confirmed the Air Asia flight QZ8501 was flying on an unauthorised schedule. The transport ministry has now frozen the airline’s permission to fly the route.

The ministry said in a statement that AirAsia was not permitted to fly the Surabaya-Singapore route on that day.

The Director General of air transport, Djoko Murjatmodjo, said the doomed airliner’s flight time had not been cleared.

“It violated the route permit given, the schedule given, that’s the problem,” he said.

Earlier, Mamamia wrote…

Recovery crews believe they have found part of the wreckage of AirAsia flight QZ8501 in 29 metres of water.

The news comes less than a week after the plane disappeared on it’s way from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

The Commander of Indonesian navy ship Banda Aceh has confirmed the find of a piece of the plane reported to be about 23 metres long. The find was a result of sonar detection by both an Indonesian ship and the American USS Sampson late on Friday.

According to Indonesian news site Tempo online, crews “strongly suspect it’s the tail part of the plane.”

Reports indicate that authorities were beginning to fear that the wreck would break apart in the ocean due to strong currents.

The focus now is on the combined crew of 67 navy and search and rescue personnel, whose job is to recover the aircraft’s black box and search for other victims.

The news comes as families of the victims on board flight QZ8501 were beginning to express frustration and anger at the delay in finding the wreck. However, as rescue boat captain Adil Triyanto told Fairfax Media, conditions at sea were wreaking havoc on the ability to search and recover, with waves between five and six metres.

“With conditions as they are, we fear the plane will all break up and float away to different parts of the ocean,” he told Fairfax Media.

So far only 30 bodies had been recovered of the 162 passengers on board, with some being found as far as 100km away from the suspected crash site.

The clock is ticking as rescue crews try and recover the remaining 132 victims before they are either lost at sea or decayed.

According to the SMH, once a body is recovered it is loaded from a ship to a helicopter then flown to Pangkalanbun where medics take them to local hospitals for storage. They are later flown to Surabaya and unloaded with military honors, after which they are taken to the morgue to be identified and later collected with more military honors.

Concern has also been expressed at the lack of open communication between rescue crews during this operation, with reports of miscommunications leading to potential errors in the search and recovery.

“It’s not the best or most ideal,” Naval Commander Haris Bima said.

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Experts: The doomed AirAsia flight soared “as fast as a fighter jet”.

A recovery mission is now underway for the victims of the AirAsia plane crash.