JAKARTA/PANGKALAN BUN: Indonesia said Wednesday it had found the tail of AirAsia Flight 8501, potentially marking a major step toward locating the plane’s black boxes and helping shed light on what caused it to crash into the sea ten days ago.

Divers and an unmanned underwater vehicle spotted the tail of the plane that crashed into the Java Sea, the first confirmed sighting of any major wreckage 10 days after Flight 8501 went down with 162 people on board, an official said.

The “black box” flight data recorders, crucial to determining the cause of the crash, are usually housed in an aircraft’s tail.

“We have successfully obtained part of the plane that has been our target. The tail portion has been confirmed found,” Soelistyo told reporters in Jakarta.

The plane vanished from radar screens during a storm on Dec. 28 when it was flying from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board, most of them Indonesian.

Powerful currents and murky water continue to hinder the operation, but searchers managed to get a photograph of the debris — about 9 km from where the plane lost contact — after it was detected by an Indonesian survey ship, National Search and Rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo told reporters.

So far 39 bodies have been found, all of them floating on the sea.

Search chiefs earlier said five large parts of the plane had been detected but had not confirmed which parts of the aircraft.

“I am led to believe the tail section has been found. If right part of tail section then the black box should be there,” AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes wrote on Twitter after the announcement.

“We need to find all parts soon so we can find all (our) guests to ease the pain of our families. That still is our priority.”

Indonesia alleges the plane was flying on an unauthorised schedule when it crashed and AirAsia has since been suspended from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route.

The country’s Transport Ministry said earlier on Wednesday that it had fired one transport official and disciplined several others in a crackdown following the crash, as it investigates how the flight was able to depart without permission.

“To date, we have taken action against eight officials, two from the Transport Ministry, four from state navigation operator AirNav, and two airport officials,” Transport Ministry official Hadi Mustofa told AFP.

“One of the Transport Ministry officials was fired and the other official was temporarily suspended. As for the other six officials, some have been temporarily suspended and some have been transferred.”

AirAsia Indonesia has declined to comment on allegations it violated its permits. Singapore authorities say the Sunday flight schedule had been cleared at their end.

The airline is a unit of Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia, which previously had a solid safety record.

Mustofa said the ministry was checking all domestic airlines for any other flight violations and would announce its findings later this week.

At Pangkalan Bun, a town on the island of Borneo with the airstrip closest to the crash site, aircraft were preparing to conduct aerial searches in the hope of spotting bodies and debris.

One released image appeared to show an upside down “A’’ painted on a piece of metal, while another grainy shot depicted some sort of mechanical parts.

The find is particularly important because the all-important cockpit voice and flight data recorders, or black boxes, are located in the aircraft’s tail. Smaller pieces of the plane, such as seats and an emergency door, had previously been collected from the surface, and six other several large objects have been detected by sonar on the seabed in the same area.

He stressed the top priority remains recovering more bodies along with the black boxes. So far, 40 corpses have been found, including an additional one announced Wednesday, but time is running out.