Roughly an hour after its take-off, AirAsia Indonesia flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control and vanished during its journey from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore. Officials stated that the communication was severed by 6:24 a.m. local time on Sunday.
Reports later revealed that the pilots asked permission to change the prearranged route due to inclement weather. Flying at 32,000 feet, the pilots pitched on having the Airbus A320-200 clamber to 38,000 feet to keep away from the clouds that carried heavy thunderstorms. Roughly five minutes after this request was denied, Ministry official Djoko Murjatmodjo confirmed that contact with the aircraft was cut. No distress call was made.
The plane has 162 people onboard. There are 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Malaysian, one Singaporean, one French and one Briton. One of them is an infant, 16 are children and there were 138 adults. In the same flight were two pilots, four cabin crew and one engineer.
More than a day after it disappeared, officials have not found a single trace of the missing plane. Worried families and friends of the passengers onboard the ill-fated aircraft came rushing to Changi Airport upon the newsbreak. There were 47 who turned up at the crisis center and AirAsia officials are close by to provide updates and emotional support. The airline company also established contact information for the passengers' other next-of-kin affected in the tragedy.
AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes is not wasting time in getting to the bottom of the tragedy, as this is the first full-scale incident the airline has encountered. Fernandes previously shared that the aircraft's pilot has acquired more than 20,500 flight hours, almost 7,000 of which with AirAsia. Furthermore, the 6-year-old aircraft is in top condition and its most recent aviation maintenance was conducted on Nov. 16.
Together with the millions awaiting news about the fate of the plane, the CEO tweeted, "Keeping positive and staying strong. My heart bleeds for all the relatives of my crew and our passangers (sic). Nothing is more important to us."
The National Search and Rescue Agency in Indonesia has deployed search and rescue missions in the Indonesian waters. Singapore and Malaysia rally around in the process while China and Australia will be sending help as well.
Henry Bambang Soelistyo, the head of the search operations, said that there are big possibilities that AirAsia Indonesia flight QZ8501 is sitting at the bottom of the sea. In turn, officials are closely scouring the southeast of Singapore, over the Java sea (between islands Belitung and Kalimantan) as this is the location the plane was in before it went off radar.
One cannot help but be reminded of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 — not that it has ever left the wondering minds of many. The aircraft was supposed to take its 239 passengers to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur but it never made it. The people in it are still nowhere to be found, despite great efforts on huge search and rescue missions. Its whereabouts remain a big mystery even after nine agonizing months.
Still unsolved and the affected still not able to recover, the same airline met another tragedy in July. Flight MH17 was shot down in the Ukraine-Russia border and not one of its 298 passengers survived. The Malaysia Airline planes in question turned out to be both Boeing 777 aircrafts.
