PANGKALAN BUN//SURABAYA: Weather was the “triggering factor” in the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 with icing likely causing engine damage, Indonesian officials said, as rough seas Sunday hampered the search for more bodies and wreckage.

The Airbus A320-200 crashed into the Java Sea on Dec. 28 carrying 162 people from Indonesia’s second city Surabaya to Singapore.

Bad weather forced divers trying to identify sunken wreckage from the crashed jet to abort their mission on Sunday and Indonesian officials said they had not yet picked up any signals from the lost plane’s “black box.”

Indonesia’s meteorological agency has said seasonal tropical storms probably contributed to last Sunday’s crash and the weather has persistently hampered efforts to recover bodies and find the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that may explain why the Airbus A320-200 plunged into the sea.

“Conditions did not allow diving operations,” the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, told a news conference in Jakarta. “Our priority is to dive in the location we suspect parts of the plane to be.”

An initial report on the website of Indonesia’s meteorological agency BMKG suggested the weather at the time the plane went down sparked the disaster after it appeared to fly into storm clouds.