A team of multinational specialists will arrive at the suspected crash site of an AirAsia jetliner off the Borneo Island on Friday, in an effort to help the search operation for the plane's black boxes.

A ship equipped with two hydrophones, or underwater acoustic detection devices, was due to arrive at the search area for AirAsia flight QZ8501, an Airbus 320-200 that crashed on Sunday en route from Indonesia to Singapore, France's BEA crash investigation agency said late Thursday.

"During the morning of January 2nd, local time, a ship will be taking the investigators to the search area, with detection equipment including hydrophones, in order to try to locate the acoustic beacons from the two flight recorders," BEA said in a statement.

The team includes experts from France, Singapore and Indonesia, said the France-based agency, which assists investigations of all air crashes involving an Airbus aircraft.

Also on Thursday, a search and rescue vessel tasked to deploy navy divers to the suspected crash site in Java Sea suspended operation due to bad weather.

"With heavy rains and wind like this strong, the wave in the crash site may rise up to 4 meters, exacerbating the visibility of the crews. It is not possible for us to go in such a bad weather condition," Adi Triyanto, captain of the Indonesian ship, told Xinhua.

He said the vessel can only go through up to 3 meters and higher than that would risk the safety of the crew. He added that the location of the area to search bodies and debris from the AirAsia plane was four hours, or 100 nautical miles, away from Kumai seaport, where the ship was docked.

Debris and bodies from the ill-fated plane were spotted on Tuesday after multinational search efforts began on Sunday. Nine bodies have so far been recovered from the airliner, which crashed with 162 people on board.

Those bodies have been sent to the Indonesian city of Surabaya, where the AirAsia plane took off, by a military cargo plane for further identification before being delivered to families.

Authorities handed over the body of the first found victim, Hayati Luthfiah Hamid, to family members at a Surabaya hospital on Thursday.

Hamid, 49, was buried before sundown in a suburb of the city at an Islamic ceremony attended by relatives and neighbors.

Meanwhile, an Indonesian official said a swift process to discover and retrieve bodies from the sea was required to ensure the effectiveness of the identification process.

Anton Casilani, executive director of Disaster Victim Identification (DVI), said identifying bodies in the sea is different from identifying those killed on land.

"Bodies in the sea have more damage possibility than those on the land. Besides that, chemical substances in the sea would damage the bodies," he told reporters in an AirAsia evacuation post command.

Due to that, he said a swift discovery and retrieval of bodies of the plane's passengers and crew is necessary for ensuring an effective identification of those bodies before handing them over to their families.

The official said bodies of those killed in a sea calamity would be first afloat on sea surface, and then sink to the bottom of the sea within less than two weeks.

But Toos Sanitiyoso, an air safety investigator with the National Committee for Transportation Safety, said the retrieval of debris and bodies to the shore has been facing major obstacles due to bad weather conditions at the crash site, adding that it could take a week to find the black boxes.

"The main thing is to find the main area of the wreckage and then the black boxes," he said.