The investigation into how AirAsia Flight QZ8501 ended up at the bottom of the Java Sea , involves recovering the bodies , accessing the flight data recorders , and meticulously mapping where debris is found to reconstruct its path . An Indonesian search and rescue official told CNN that he thinks material detected by sonar equipment in the water is from AirAsia Flight QZ8501 . So what happens next ? Priorities . The first priority is to recover the bodies and return them to their loved ones , Indonesian authorities say . Helicopters are lowering divers to bring back bodies and debris from the surface of the water . The bodies give clues about what happened on the flight , based on where they 're found and their condition . For example , sea water in their lungs would suggest that the people on board may have been conscious when the plane struck the sea . There is particular attention to the location of the bodies and various debris . David Soucie , a former Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector and analyst for CNN , likens it to `` peeling an onion apart and then putting that onion back together from the inside out . '' Investigators map the debris found on the surface of the water . Then they have to look for other pieces in the next level of sea for more clues , he said . `` So you might go down 50 feet or so , to see if there 's any floating debris there . And you keep going down and mapping it as it goes . You see how the drift went and how the pieces of the plane moved . '' During the investigation of Air France Flight 447 , more than 150,000 images of the plane 's wreckage site in the Atlantic Ocean were taken . It was important to `` mosaic them together '' to give investigators a comprehensive view of the wreckage site , said David Gallo , who co-led that search after the French jet crashed in 2009 . Data recorders . The key to understanding what happened is likely contained in the aircraft 's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder , commonly known as black boxes . If they are recovered , Indonesian authorities will designate which agency should open and download the information . The black boxes , which are actually orange , are located in the tail for Airbus 320-200s . The cockpit voice recorder collects audio from the pilots ' microphones and various channels . `` It picks up other sounds like clicks , things going wrong , thuds , hail . You can hear that on the windshield , '' said Mary Schiavo , a lawyer and former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation . Acoustic experts can comb through the audio to try to determine the meaning of every click and sound . The data recorder holds hundreds of pieces of data such as airspeed , altitude , whether the plane 's nose was up or down and which direction it was headed . All that data would print out on long sheets , almost like EKGs , that authorities would use to piece together a timeline of the flight . Because the AirAsia plane was only six years old , its data recorder is fairly modern and would contain lots of parameters , Schiavo said . Challenges in the search . Although the plane is in much shallower waters than where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is believed to have fallen , search crews face challenges . Nature certainly is n't helping . `` The problem that the search team is now facing is the monsoon season , '' said Eric van Sebille , oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Australia . `` This plane could n't have gone down in a worse time of year . There 's big winds , choppy waves . These shallow seas are known for complicated waves . It 's really difficult to work in . '' This could put search and recovery crews at risk and decrease visibility . They 're also working under a deadline as the plane 's pingers , or underwater locator beacons , only last for about 30 days . Salvage operation . Salvage operations to lift the wreckage are complicated , but the process has been done before in places deeper than the bottom of the Java Sea , which is about 140 feet ( 43 meters ) down . The U.S. Navy salvaged pieces of TWA Flight 800 , which crashed off New York in 1996 , from depths of 115 to 130 feet . In 1998 , Canadian officials lifted pieces of Swiss Air Flight 111 from the depths of 180 feet , off the coast of Nova Scotia . Underwater vehicles , designed for deep water salvage operations , can descend as deep as 20,000 feet . They could retrieve smaller items such as the flight data recorder . Since they can only carry up to 4,000 pounds , larger pieces , such as the fuselage would have to be attached to a cable and pulled to the surface by a crane on a ship . This was done for recovering remnants of the fuselage of Air France Flight 447 .
Experts : First priority is to recover bodies and return them to families . Location of debris and bodies are carefully studied and mapped . Data collected are key pieces of evidence . Special operations have been used for plane crashes that were deeper than Java Deep .