Sunu Widyatmoko, the chief executive of AirAsia’s Indonesian subsidiary, confirmed government officials had suspended the airline’s permission to fly from Surabaya to Singapore but declined to comment further.
Meanwhile search teams operating in the Java Sea reported detecting an oil slick and “two big objects” believed to be parts of the plan’s main fuselage.
“With the oil slick that we found and the discovery of the two big objects, I can confirm that this is the big part of the AirAsia plane we have been looking for all this time,” Bambang Soelistyo, the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told reporters.
Teams of divers were expected to explore those objects on Saturday, weather permitting.
As the search entered its sixth day, with around 60 vessels and 20 aircraft now involved, there was renewed speculation that “extreme weather” had contributed to south-east Asia’s third major airline catastrophe of 2014.
A 14-page "meteorological analysis" from Indonesia's Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said one likely scenario was that icing, caused by bad weather, had “damaged” the Airbus’s engines.
"This is however just one analysis of what likely happened based on available meteorological data, and is not the final determination on the cause of the incident,” said the report, quoted by Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper.
Tony Fernandes, the AirAsia chief, has hinted extreme weather played a major role in the tragedy. “What we are beginning to see is that there were some very unique weather conditions,” he said earlier this week.
“I continue to have full faith in our operations in Indonesia and elsewhere,” he added.
As Indonesian rescue teams flew the bodies of 12 more victims back to Surabaya for identification and burial, heart-breaking reports emerged about a 15-year-old Indonesian girl who lost her entire family in the tragedy.
Chiara Natasya Tanus, a Surabaya-born student who was attending school in Singapore, lost both parents and both brothers - aged 17 and 9 - in the crash. They had been coming to visit her for New Year’s Eve and when they did not arrive at Sinagpore airport as expected last Sunday she returned home to her dormitory.
“We were supposed to have the best time in Singapore - we planned to spend the rest of holidays together,” the orphaned teenager told Indonesia’s Jawa Pos newspaper.
“I was so excited. I was looking forward to showing my dormitory to my family,” she added.
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