Posted on 12/28/2014 7:30:34 AM PST by SeekAndFind
JAKARTA, Indonesia – Several hours of searching Indonesian waters turned up no sign of an AirAsia plane that disappeared Sunday with 162 people on board in airspace possibly thick with dense storm clouds, strong winds and lightning, officials said.
Aircraft searching for AirAsia Flight 8501 called off the effort for the night and will resume at Monday morning, said Achmad Toha of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency. Some ships were continuing the search overnight, he said.
The plane took off Sunday morning from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, and was about halfway to its destination, Singapore, when it vanished from radar.
The last communication between the pilot and air traffic control was at 6:13 a.m. (2313 GMT Saturday), when the pilot “asked to avoid clouds by turning left and going higher to 34,000 feet (10,360 metres).” It was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m., and a minute later was no longer there, Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation, told reporters.
More than 12 hours later, shocked family members huddled at the Surabaya airport from where the Airbus A320 had taken off, awaiting any news of the jetliner, operated by an airline whose parent company is based in Malaysia. It is the third major aviation incident involving Malaysia this year: in March, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people, and in July, a jet from the same airline was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.
Indonesia and Singapore launched a search and rescue operation for Flight 8501 near Belitung island in Java Sea, the area where the jetliner lost contact with ground traffic control about 42 minutes after taking off from Surabaya.
“This is my worst nightmare,” Fernandes tweeted.
Malaysia-based AirAsia, which has a presence in most of Southeast Asia and recently in India, has never lost a plane before and has a good safety track record. Flight 8501 was operated by AirAsia Indonesia, a subsidiary that is 49 per cent owned by AirAsia Malaysia.
Sunardi, a weather forecaster at the Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said dense storm clouds were detected up to 44,000 feet in the same area at the time the plane was reported to have lost contact.
“There could have been turbulence, lightning and vertical as well as horizontal strong winds within such clouds,” said Sunardi, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.
The plane had an Indonesian captain and a French co-pilot, five cabin crew and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, AirAsia Indonesia said in a statement.
Among the passengers were three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a British national and his 2-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.
AirAsia said the captain had a total of 6,100 flying hours, a substantial number, and the first officer a total of 2,275 flying hours.
At Surabaya airport, dozens of relatives sat in a room, many of them talking on mobile phones and crying. Some looked dazed. As word spread, more and more family members were arriving at the crisis centre to await word.
There were 155 passengers on board, the company said in a statement:
138 adults, 16 children and one infant
Most on board were Indonesian
Several were from other countries: one UK national, a Malaysian, a Singaporean and three South Koreans
Two pilots and five crew were also on board – one French, the others Indonesian
Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan told reporters in Surabaya that search and rescue efforts now involved the Indonesian army, the national Search and Rescue Agency as well as Singapore and Malaysia.
The Search and Rescue Agency’s operation chief, Maj. Gen. Tatang Zaenudin, said 200 rescuers had been deployed to the east side of Belitung island.
Air Force spokesman Hadi Tjahjanto said three aircraft, including a surveillance plane, were dispatched to the area. The Singapore air force and the navy also searched with two C-130 planes. The area continued to receive heavy rain as searchers looked for the lost aircraft.
Airbus said in a statement that the missing aircraft was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008, which would make it six years old. It said the plane had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights. AirAsia said the aircraft had last undergone scheduled maintenance on Nov. 16.
AirAsia, which has dominated cheap travel in the region for years, flies short routes of just a few hours, connecting large cities of Southeast Asia. Recently it has tried to expand into long-distance flying through its sister airline AirAsia X.
Fernandes, who is the face of AirAsia and an active Twitter user, sent out an earlier tweet saying: “Thank you for all your thoughts and prays. We must stay strong.” He tweeted later that he was heading to Surabaya.
Fernandes stirred controversy earlier this year after incorrectly tweeting that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, now synonymous with one of aviation’s enduring mysteries, had landed safely. The wide-bodied Boeing 777 disappeared with 239 people aboard soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8. It remains missing.
Another Malaysia Airlines flight, also a Boeing 777, was shot down over rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine while on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17. All 298 people on board were killed.
William Waldock, an expert on air crash search and rescue with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, cautioned against drawing comparisons to the disappearance of Flight 370.
“I think we have to let this play out,” he said. “Hopefully, the airplane will get found, and if that happens, it will probably be in the next few hours. Until then, we have to reserve judgment.”
The circumstances bode well for finding the plane since the intended flight time was less than two hours and there is a known position at which the plane disappeared, he said.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, expressed solidarity with AirAsia. In a tweet he said: “Very sad to hear that AirAsia Indonesia QZ8501 is missing. My thoughts are with the families. Malaysia stands ready to help.”
President Barack Obama, who was vacationing in Hawaii, was briefed on the plane’s disappearance and officials were tracking the situation, the White House said.
The Airbus A320 is a workhorse of modern aviation. Similar to the Boeing 737, it is used to connect cities anywhere from one to five hours apart. There are currently 3,606 A320s in operation worldwide, according to Airbus. The A320 family of jets, which includes A319 and A321, has a very good safety record, with just 0.14 fatal accidents per million takeoffs, according to a safety study published by Boeing in August.
Hull-born Chi Man Choi (pictured), and his two-year-old daughter Zoe were on board the missing AirAsia flight which disappeared after departing Indonesia
Flight 8501 disappeared while it was at its cruising altitude, which is usually the safest part of a trip. Just 10 per cent of fatal crashes from 2004 through 2013 occurred while a plane was in that stage of flight, according to the August Boeing safety report.
In 2007, an Indonesia-owned Adam Air flight carrying 102 people vanished during a domestic flight. Debris was found a few days later, but much of the fuselage remains on the ocean floor. In 1995, an Indonesian plane operated by Merpati Nusantara Airlines disappeared over open water while flying between islands in the archipelago nation. The 14 crew and passengers were never found.
Passing through bad weather such as severe thunderstorms could have been a factor with Flight 8501. Airbus jets are very sophisticated and are able to automatically adjust to wind shears or other weather disruptions. However, weather has played a role in past air disasters that occurred at cruise elevation, including the 2009 Air France Flight 447 crash over the Atlantic Ocean.
Another possibility is some type of catastrophic metal fatigue caused by the cycle of pressurization and depressurization associated with each takeoff and landing cycle — something that Flight 8501 would have done a lot. Still, metal fatigue is unlikely because this plane is only six years old.
The last contact from the pilot was when he reportedly asked to deviate from the flight path due to bad weather. Pictured: A satellite image from about the time the flight went missing shows big thunderstorms in the area
I’ll be the first FReeper to say it’s parked in a secret hangar in the middle east being converted to a terror bomb by ISIS.
/s
I’m wondering what the Friday night news dump from the WH was that needs to be obscured, myself.
Muslims make plane go BOOM! Anyone STUPID enough to travel on Islamic owned anything deserves what they get.
I think what happened was the plane flew into some extreme turbulence from the thunderstorms over the Java Sea (common at this time of the year) and somehow, the plane lost control and crashed.
The first thing you have to do is check the crew names for people named “Mohammed”, right?
Oh, I dunno. I thought that ISIS was on the fast-track to being recognized as a nation and would therefore be the beneficiary of World Bank loans for infrastructure which would include airplanes.
Surabaya Johnny
No one’s meaner than you
You broke my heart, Johnny
But I still love you so
(Kurt Weill, “Surabaya Johnny”)
CNN just got their New Years lineup finalized.
I wonder, does an A320 have pitot heat. I believe speculation about the Air France disaster was that Airbus did not have pitot heat on the 3 pitot-static systems and they may have frozen over in the thunder storm and confused the fly-by-wire systems causing the crash. A similar incident happened to a B-1 bomber on take off when the pitot heat was not engaged.
All well and good, but I think they tracked this plane’s course on radar, and saw no sucharge evidence that the plane was somehow struggling.
*such, not “surcharge”
Well, one thing for sure, CNN has their programming set for the next 3 months.
I’m sure all commercial airliners have pitot heat... the AF plane off Brasil had defective/inadequate heat...
The wx just east of Belitung Island looks pretty bad.. but I’m only seeing level4+ (purple and black) in the bigger cells ,, it’s possible the cell cluster west of there is what they flew into if the time of the screenshot was an hour or two before they lost contact,,, looks like the storms were developing as they moved eastward.
The timestamp on the radar is 0032Z so it is about 90 mins after they requested a vector and higher... might have put them in the middle of that black mess that is shown east of their last location...
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