Reports: Pings detected in AirAsia search

Melanie Eversley | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Efforts continue to recover airplane tail Recovery efforts continue to retrieve the tail of crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501. Julie Noce reports. Video provided by Reuters

Teams hunting for the black box recorder from an AirAsia flight that disappeared Dec. 28 have detected pings, according to news reports.

"We received an update from the field that the pinger locator detected pings," Santoso Sayogo, investigator for Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee, told Reuters.

"We have our fingers crossed it is the black box," he said. "Divers need to confirm."

The signals first appeared a few days ago, Tatang Kurniadi, chief of the Indonesian committee, told NBC News.

"It comes and goes," Kurniadi told the news organization. "There are many possibilities. One is that the pinger has been detached from the black box."

A ship first detected the pings and they are believed to be coming from the area of the tail of the plane, S.B. Supriyadi, Indonesia's director of national search and rescue, told the BBC.

The tail is the main target of the search operation and once the black box is located, the tail will be removed from the water, AirAsia reported on its Facebook page.

AirAsia flight QZ8501 vanished from radar while en route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore.

The bodies of 46 of the 162 people who were on board have been found along with some wreckage.