Indonesian search ships have detected signals believed to be from the flight recorders of the AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea last month with 162 people on board.
"Three ships equipped with ping detectors received pings from the same location," said Ridwan Djamaluddin, from the Agency for the Application of Technology, whose ship was involved in the search.
He said the ping came from a location about one to four kilometres from where the aircraft's broken tail section was retrieved on Saturday.
"We are confident it's from the black box," he said, referring to the voice cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder.
Searchers lifted the aircraft's tail from the bottom of the sea on Saturday but did not find the recorders.
Data from the recorders help investigators determine the chain of events leading to an accident, and its root cause.
Officials said the recorders, which are normally located in a passenger jet's tail, could have been detached from the plane as it crashed.
The search to find the black boxes is a race against time as the devices' batteries are designed to transmit signals for up to 30 days. The plane crashed on December 28.
The homing beacon emitted by one of the recorders appeared to be about a kilometre from where the tail section was found, based on the signal detected by Indonesian ship KN Jadayat.
AirAsia flight QZ8501 was flying from Surabaya to Singapore when it disappeared from radar somewhere above the Karimata Strait in the Java Sea.
So far, 48 bodies have been retrieved from the water, but no survivors have been found.
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