A special search team from the United States will help look for more than 50 missing bodies and the wreckage from an airliner submerged on the ocean floor, an Aeroperu official said Friday.
Clues to why Flight 603 went down early Wednesday morning with 70 people aboard are believed to lie under 600 feet of water, too deep for Peruvian divers.Raul del Solar, an attorney for Aeroperu, said a special deep-water team from the United States would arrive in two or three days to probe the ocean floor for the missing fuselage.
"It is a U.S. government team used in searches for aircraft in the ocean depths," del Solar said at an evening news conference.
On Friday, authorities recovered a 15th body from the crash. As the current pulls bodies and debris 18.5 miles a day, the search has moved northward, del Solar said.
The navy was using sonar to search for the fuselage of the downed Boeing 757.
Authorities first spotted the fuselage under nearly 600 feet of water Wednesday. By Thursday, it had vanished, dragged by the Humboldt current that flows northward up the Pacific coast of South America from Antarctica.
With the proper equipment salvage experts have recovered debris from planes submerged in as much as 7,200 feet of water.
Until the Aeroperu wreck is found, investigators have little more to go on than what the pilot told the control tower before the crash.
As the plane neared disaster, pilot Erick Schreiber complained that his control panel was out and he did not know the plane's speed, altitude or exact location.
"Why did the computers fail?" asked Transportation Minister Elsa Carrera, who insists technical problems were to blame, citing the pilot's statement that the "computers have gone crazy."
This was the third crash of a Boeing 757 in less than a year.