Editors' note, update at 7:35 a.m. ET: On Tuesday, December 30,AirAsia confirmed it had found debris from flight QZ8501 in the Karimata Strait off the coast of Borneo, 40 miles from the plane's last known position in air. The cause of the crash remains unclear.
An AirAsia passenger jet carrying 162 people to Singapore went missing off the coast of Borneo on Sunday morning shortly after leaving Indonesia, and two days of searching has turned up nothing. Shortly before losing contact with air traffic control, the crew sought permission to deviate from the planned flight path to avoid foul weather.
The plane likely crashed and is now probably "at the bottom of the sea," says the head of Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Flight QZ8501 took off from Surabaya-Juanda Airport without incident at 5:35 a.m. local time Sunday and was to arrive in Singapore three hours later. It headed west, tracking 329° over the Java Sea, and reached the planned cruising altitude at 5:54 a.m. The crew made a two slight turns, then at 6:12 a.m. contacted Jakarta aircraft control to say they were moving west of their course to avoid clouds, and asked to climb from a cruising altitude of 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet, according to a report from the Aviation Safety Network. The plane disappeared from radar a few minutes later.
"The plane has lost contact at 06:17 a.m. local time," Djoko Murdjatmojo, the Indonesian Transportation Ministry's acting director general for air transportation affairs, told reporters, according to CNN. The Airbus A320-200 disappeared from radar observations at 6:18 a.m., he said.
The airplane's flight plan took it through cloudy, stormy weather; The New York Times reported that there were lightning strikes along the way, but the foul weather was nothing a modern airliner could not handle. The plane was traveling a busy corridor; six other aircraft were in the area when ground control lost contact with Flight QZ8501, according to data from Flightradar24:
Authorities had not, by the end of the day Sunday, detected the distress signal and beacon that would be activated in an accident.
“Therefore we cannot assume anything yet,” Murjatmodjo told reporters at a news conference in Jakarta, according to the Times.
After finding no trace of the jet, the search was suspended Monday night. It will resume Tuesday morning, and will expand to land, the Straits Times reports.
The plane was flying over a busy shipping channel with shallow waters. Within an hour of the disappearance, Singapore had offered aircraft and ships to the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency; as the search went on, planes and ships from at least three countries were searching some 100 miles of the Java Sea near Belitung, an island between Borneo and Sumatra.
The fleet included three warships and five planes from Indonesia, three boats and three planes from Malaysia and a C-130 aircraft from Singapore. Australia also offered aircraft and ships to join the search, the Times reported. Singapore volunteered to send two teams of specialists and two sets of underwater locator beacon detectors to help Indonesian authorities with the effort.
Authorities suspended the search as night fell, having found no sign of the aircraft. The search is to resume Monday morning, and CNN reported that ships in the area will stay out, rather than return to shore, with their search lights illuminated. The plane’s last known location, over a shipping route in the relatively narrow Java Sea, should make finding any sign of it easier if the plane did in fact go down. “Still, the ocean is awfully big,” former NTSB director Peter Goelz told CNN.
Of the 162 people aboard Flight QZ8501, 155 are Indonesian, three are South Korean, one is British, one is French, one is Malaysian and one is Singaporean, the airline said. Seventeen children, including one infant, are among the passengers. The plane carried a crew of seven.
AirAsia, which has changed the color of its logo from red to grey on its website and social media accounts, has established an emergency hotline for families and friends of those on board and opened a “relatives holding area” at Singapore’s Changi Airport. The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore has provided counselors and is arranging local accommodation and travel to Singapore from Indonesia for relatives of those aboard. Meanwhile, at the airport in Surabaya, relatives wept as they waited for any word on the passengers. Some used phones to photograph a flight manifest posted on a wall, according to CNN; the documents provided the name and seat number of each passenger but no word on their fate. Many sat crying.
"Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. We must stay strong," AirAsia Chief Executive Tony Fernandes said on Twitter.
The investigation will, by default, be run by Indonesia, where the plane is registered. The US National Transportation Safety Board could be invited to participate. France’s Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety has sent two investigators to Jakarta, along with two technical advisors from Airbus.
Finding the plane’s two black boxes will be crucial to figuring out exactly what went wrong. The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder will have information on a wide variety of aircraft parameters, and what was happening in the cockpit in the final two hours of flight.
AirAsia is a budget carrier based in Malaysia, one with a "very good" reputation for safety, according to CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest. The captain of the flight has almost 7,000 hours of flight time with the airline and some 20,000 during his career, Fernandes said, according to BBC. Airbus said the plane had "accumulated approximately 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights," according to CNN.
The disappearance of Flight QZ8501 caps a devastating year for Asian aviation. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace on March 8 enroute to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people aboard. On July 17, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.
This story was updated 12/29/14 at 8:40 EST to include new details on the status of the search.
