AirAsia QZ 8501 Update Day 17: Fuselage Retrieved, Flight Data Results To Be Released

The main part of the body and fuselage of the wrecked AirAsia QZ 8501 plane have been found, recent reports confirmed.

So far, 48 bodies have been found, and officials say that most of the bodies are likely to be found inside the fuselage. The additional finds are significant since the black boxes, the tail end and other debris will help investigators find the missing clue to the plane crash which took off from Surabaya to Singapore.

Flight 8501 was supposed to be a short flight of two hours, but the plane went off the radar screen 43rd min into the flight. One of the strong theories for the downing of the AirAsia Indonesia flight was the ice formation stalling its engines, caused by extreme weather conditions leading to the crash.

"The priority now is to locate bodies, and divers are expected to search the fuselage Thursday morning," Indonesia's search and rescue chief Bambang Soelistyo told reporters .

The depth of the fuselage was not revealed by the search team. In the event that search divers can't access it, the team will lift have to lift the entire plane wreckage from the water to retrieve more bodies. It wasn't immediately clear how that would be done, but in order to recover the tail section of the plane last Saturday, giant balloons were inflated underwater to lift it. A crane then lifted the tail onto a ship.

Preliminary investigations will be released after a month of the AirAsia crash, while a more thorough report is expected in a year.

Former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Mary Schiavo told CNN that "because the recorders' data had been downloaded, investigators should have a pretty good idea within a couple of days of what happened aboard the plane."

Schiavo said it would take at least two weeks for data from the AirAsia QZ 8501 crash to be released.