A body recovered on Wednesday from the crashed AirAsia plane was wearing a life jacket, an Indonesian search and rescue official said, raising new questions about how the disaster unfolded.

"This morning, we recovered a total of four bodies and one of them was wearing a life jacket," Tatang Zaenudin, an official with the search and rescue agency, told Reuters.

He declined to speculate on what the find might mean. But a pilot who works for a Gulf carrier said the life jacket indicated the cause of the crash was not "catastrophic failure". Instead, the plane could have stalled and then come down, possibly because its instruments iced up and gave the pilots inaccurate readings.