CNN Wolf December 31, 2014 18:54:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
the cnn weather center. this is very important, this search. you have both on ships searching. you have planes searching. the aerial search was suspended today because of the bad weather. what are the conditions going to be like in the hours and days ahead? rain clouds and wind of 30. i know that sounds bad. but the model run that just expired and we got a new one said rain, clouds, wind to 50. so somehow we re going in the right direction but still a wave at 15 20 feet high doesn t help find pieces of an airplane in the water. it gets too mixed up. we re actually in pretty good shape. the problem is, it s dark. so not many crews out there. you don t have aerial searches in the dark. and even though this is the best weather we ve had all day. by morning, we have more weather moving back in. that s the kind of diurnal pattern we have here. in the morning, cloudy and stormy. by late afternoon, it goes away.
there has been heavy rain at the site of the crash and in the nearby locations. there has been high waves and also high winds. that makes it very difficult for the divers with little visibility but also for the ships and the aerial support to be able to do their job. the fear at this point is that that bad weather could continue for the next couple of days making what is already an agonizing wait for those families even worse. paula hancocks cnn, on the west coast of borneo. for more on the efforts to find the rest of the plane and the victims, i m joined now by the wall street journal s science correspondent andy paster we have cnn analyst david soucie and aviation analyst peter goelz. there are seven bodies that have been found. this is not very many bodies found over the last couple of days of searches. does it tell you anything or are expecteding more will be found? you would hope they would find more bodies during the next day or two.
flight 8501. the agonizing wait for crews to recover the bodies of their loved ones. cnn s andrew stevens is at the airport in surabaya, indonesia. you ve been covering this from the beginning. you ve seen the grief that family members are going through. are they getting all of the answers that they need? are they being kept updated in a timely manner? reporter: they ve being kept updated as much as they can be. but it is an anguished wait for them because at the moment, the weather conditions are so bad that they can t actually continue to bring bodies out. so at the moment only seven bodies have officially been brought from the debris field. and they are still searching for the main the primary fuselage where the plane went down. most of it they think now intact. and that grim scene about 40 meters under the water the
two hours before darkness. and the conditions are likely to be very much the same today. we still have several hours before daylight. but there are very high winds there on the scene. there is heavy rain which really cuts the visibility. and perhaps most important, there s big waves there. we were told up to 20-foot waves. so you can imagine the difficulties the search parties are going to have. divers haven t been able to get into the water yet. there are vessels down there with sonar equipment. but at the moment they still haven t located that fuselage. they think they may have. but they can t confirm it. so they re the sort of frustrations creeping in for the search parties at the moment and the weather is likely to continue as it is for perhaps the next 48 hours. way too long for these families hoping for answers. andrew stevens thank you so much from surabaya for us. as these families wait for word on their loved ones, investigators are hard at work trying to figure out what cau