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JAKARTA, Indonesia -- An astonishingly tragic year for air
travel in Southeast Asia turned worse Sunday when an AirAsia plane
carrying 162 people disappeared over stormy Indonesian waters, with no
word on its fate despite several hours of searching by air and sea.
AirAsia
Flight 8501 vanished in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way
from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Searchers had to fight against
heavy rain.
The Malaysia-based carrier's loss
comes on top of the still-unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370 in March and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in
July over Ukraine.
At the Surabaya airport,
passengers' relatives pored over the plane's manifest, crying and
embracing. Nias Adityas, a housewife from Surabaya, was overcome with
grief when she found the name of her husband, Nanang Priowidodo, on the
list.
The 43-year-old tour agent had been
taking a family of four on a trip to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia's
Lombok island, and had been happy to get the work.
"He
just told me, `Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good
fortune,'" Adityas recalled, holding her grandson tight while weeping
uncontrollably. "He apologized because he could not join us for the new
year celebration."
Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays.
The
Airbus A320 took off Sunday morning from Indonesia's second-largest
city and was about halfway to Singapore when it vanished from radar. The
jet had been airborne for about 42 minutes.
There
was no distress signal from the twin-engine, single-aisle plane, said
Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia's acting director general of
transportation.
The last communication between
the cockpit and air traffic control was at 6:13 a.m. (23:13 GMT
Saturday), when one of the pilots "asked to avoid clouds by turning left
and going higher to 34,000 feet (10,360 meters)," Murjatmodjo said. The
jet was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m. and was gone a minute later, he
told reporters.
Indonesia, Singapore and
Malaysia launched a search-and-rescue operation near Belitung island in
the Java Sea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground.
The
air search was suspended Sunday evening and was to resume Monday
morning, said Achmad Toha of Indonesia's search-and-rescue agency. Some
ships continued looking for the aircraft overnight, he said.
AirAsia
group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and told a news conference
that the focus should be on the search and the families rather than the
cause of the incident.
"We have no idea at the
moment what went wrong," said Fernandes, a Malaysian businessman who
founded the low-cost carrier in 2001. "Let's not speculate at the
moment."
Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane before.
"This is my worst nightmare," Fernandes tweeted.
But
Malaysia itself has already endured a catastrophic year, with 239
people still missing from Flight 370 and all 298 people aboard Flight 17
killed when it was shot down over rebel-held territory in Ukraine.
AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather.
Sunardi,
a forecaster at Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said
dense storm clouds were detected up to 13,400 meters (44,000 feet) in
the area at the time.
"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.
Airline pilots routinely fly around
thunderstorms, said John Cox, a former accident investigator. Using
on-board radar, flight crews can typically see a storm forming from more
than 100 miles away.
In such cases, pilots have plenty of time to find a way around the storm cluster or look for gaps to fly through, he said.
"It's
not like you have to make an instantaneous decision," Cox said. Storms
can be hundreds of miles long, but "because a jet moves at 8 miles a
minute. If you to go 100 miles out of your way, it's not a problem."
It
was unclear based on comments from authorities what air traffic
controllers saw on their screens when the plane disappeared from radar,
he noted.
Authorities have not said whether
they lost only the secondary radar target, which is created by the
plane's transponder, or whether the primary radar target, which is
created by energy reflected from the plane's body, was lost as well, Cox
said.
The plane had an Indonesian captain and
a French co-pilot, five cabin crew members and 155 passengers,
including 16 children and one infant, the airline 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 has a
total of 6,100 flying hours, but Fernandes later said the number is more
than 20,000. The first officer has 2,275 flying hours.
At
Surabaya airport, dozens of relatives sat in a room waiting for news,
many of them talking on mobile phones and crying. Some looked dazed.
Dimas,
who goes by one name, said his wife, 30-year-old Ratri Sri Andriani,
had been on the flight to lead a group of 25 Indonesian tourists on a
trip to Singapore and Malaysia. He was holding out hope that the plane
had made an emergency landing.
"We can just
pray and hope that all those aboard are safe," said Dimas, who was
surrounded by Ratri's parents and friends at the airport crisis center.
"We are worried, of course, but we have to surrender to her fate."
Indonesia's
search-and-rescue head, Bambang Soelistyo, said his agency would search
Monday with 12 ships and three helicopters, along with five military
aircraft and a number of warships.
Malaysia and Singapore each planned to deploy one C-130 plane and three ships. Australia will also help, he added.
The
missing aircraft was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008, and the
plane had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours during some 13,600
flights, Airbus said in a statement.
The aircraft had last undergone scheduled maintenance on Nov. 16, according to AirAsia.
The
airline, which has dominated cheap travel in Southeast Asia for years,
flies short routes of just a few hours, connecting the region's large
cities. Recently, it has tried to expand into long-distance flying
through sister airline AirAsia X.
Fernandes,
who is the face of AirAsia and an active Twitter user, stirred
controversy earlier this year after incorrectly tweeting that Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370 had landed safely.
William
Waldock, an expert on air crash search and rescue with Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, cautioned against drawing
comparisons to Flight 370.
The circumstances
bode well for finding Flight 8501 since the intended flight time was
less than two hours, and there is a known position where the plane
disappeared, he said.
The A320 family of jets,
which includes the A319 and A321, has a good safety record, with just
0.14 fatal accidents per million takeoffs, according to a safety study
published by Boeing in August.
Flight 8501
disappeared while at its cruising altitude, which is usually the safest
part of a trip. Just 10 percent of fatal crashes from 2004 to 2013
occurred while a plane was in that stage of flight, the safety report
said.
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