Piece of crashed Indonesian airliner found in sea

A fisherman found a piece of a Boeing 737 that disappeared more than 10 days ago, the first hard evidence that the plane carrying 102 people had crashed into the sea off northeastern Indonesia, a top search official said today.

Later, a television station showed pictures of a commercial airplane seat and an orange life jacket found nearby.

The first piece found, a yard-long piece of tail stabilizer from Adam Air Flight 574, was recovered Wednesday in the Makassar Strait, about 1,000 feet off the western coast of Sulawesi island, said Eddy Suyanto, the head of search and rescue operations.

Suyanto told reporters that the serial number on the fragment matched the one Boeing gave to the search and rescue teams.

“What was found was the right tail’s stabilizer number 65C25746-76. This thing was found by a fisherman in Parepare,” Suyanto said.

Parepare is a seaside town about 60 miles north of Makassar, capital of South Sulawesi province, from where the search is being coordinated.

Suyanto had no reports of survivors or bodies being recovered, but police later said the body of a woman was found floating in the general area where the wreckage was located.

A U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ship, the Mary Sears, arrived Wednesday in an area 125 miles from where the tail piece was found to determine whether metal objects found on the seabed there were also wreckage from the plane.

An Indonesian vessel located three pieces of debris on the Makassar Strait seabed after fishermen told authorities that they had spotted a low-flying aircraft and heard a loud bang.

The debris was about 2 1/2 miles from West Sulawesi province’s capital, Mamuju, at a depth of about 4,500 feet, Suyanto said Wednesday.

The pilot of the Adam Air plane, which left Java island on Jan. 1 for Manado, the capital of the North Sulawesi province, twice changed course because of rough weather, officials said.