AirAsia Flight 8501: Composite Piece From Near Plane's Wing Recovered, Search Official Says

Update as of 1:40 a.m. EST: An investigator from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee told Channel News Asia that a part of AirAsia Flight 8501 was retrieved from the Java Sea on Friday. The debris is believed to be a composite piece from near the plane's wing.

Update as of 12:05 a.m. EST: The head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency (Basarnas) has refuted earlier reports that said pings from AirAsia Flight 8501's black box had been detected on Friday, according to a report from Channel News Asia.

Search and rescue teams hunting for the remains of crashed AirAsia Flight 8501 have detected pings from the aircraft's black box flight recorder, Santoso Sayogo, an investigator at Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee told Reuters Friday.

The discovery comes after search teams detected signals from the recorder near the area where the plane's tail has been located in the east Java Sea on Wednesday, but later lost track of them. The flight recorders on the aircraft, an Airbus A320-200, are located in the tail section.

AirAsia Flight 8501 (also known as Flight QZ8501) vanished from radar screens Dec. 28, while en route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore, carrying 162 people. Malaysia's transport minister said Friday that two more bodies had been recovered during the search operation, bringing the total number found to 46, according to Aviation News. No survivors from the crash were found.

The loss of Flight 8501 capped off a disastrous year for the Asian airline industry, which also saw two Malaysian Airlines planes lost. Malaysia Flight MH370 went missing while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, while carrying 298 people. The aircraft hasn't been found, but a search operation is ongoing. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over strife-torn eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, while carrying 239 people.

This is a developing story -- check back for further updates.