Weather forces expansion of AirAsia search

Investigators in Indonesia wrapped up a 10th consecutive day of searching for the wreckage of AirAsia Flight 8501 Tuesday, but as crews try to find and recover the victims, weather and currents are dragging the wreckage of the Airbus 320 to the east, and the search, in turn, has shifted in that direction.

"Time is of the essence," said Suryadi B. Supriyadi, the head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency. "But it seems like it is hard to beat the weather."

The man in charge of the hunt for the jet and its passengers and crew said the search area was to expand by more than 70 square miles on Tuesday.

Two more bodies were found Tuesday, bringing the total number of victims of the crash to 39; 123 people are still missing.

CBS News' Jeff Pegues reports that Indonesian authorities are hoping the expanded search area will also help them locate the "black boxes," which are found in the plane's tail. They contain the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder -- essential for nailing down what happened to the doomed flight. So far, none of the search vessels have detected any pings from the black boxes. The pings are emitted on battery power for about a month after a crash, until the batteries die.

A number of ships -- including two U.S. Navy destroyers, continue to comb the Java Sea floor, using sonar to try and locate the plane's wreckage. So far, crews have identified five large objects on the seafloor, including one believed by a search ship's captain to be the tail of the aircraft, though that key discovery has yet to be confirmed.

Pegues says that, based on what's been recovered so far, Indonesian search and rescue authorities say it appears AirAsia 8501 broke into pieces, and they believe they know what brought the aircraft down.

Government officials say weather was a "triggering factor" in the December 28 crash. They believe the plane flew through cloud clusters, in which satellite images indicate temperatures around 121 degrees below zero.

A report from Indonesia's meteorological agency said "the most probable weather phenomenon was icing that can cause engine damage due to the cooling air. This is just one of the possibilities that occur based on the analysis of meteorological data."

Aviation analyst Kyle Bailey says the region sees "the worst thunderstorms in the world... you have lightning, you have updrafts, you have downdrafts, you have hail you have ice."

In 2009, Air France Flight 447 went down in the Atlantic Ocean with 228 aboard, and when investigators recovered the black boxes two years later, they discovered the pilots lost control after ice crystals caused the plane's air speed indicators to malfunction.

"There are a lot of similarities between that crash and this crash," said Bailey. "My gut feeling is once those black boxes are found, within a week or several weeks we'll have a very good idea of what happened to the airplane."