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Missing AirAsia flight QZ8501: Officials warn aircraft is likely 'at the bottom of the sea' as search is stepped up
Missing AirAsia flight QZ8501: Officials warn aircraft is likely 'at the bottom of the sea' as search is stepped up
(about 2 hours later)
The search for a missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people that disappeared more than 24 hours ago on a flight from Indonesia to Singapore expanded Monday with planes and ships from several countries taking part.
Singaporean officials have warned that missing AirAsia aeroplane QZ8501 may be “at the bottom of the sea” as an aviation expert warned the pilot may have been travelling too slowly.
First Admiral Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Center commander at the Surabaya air force base, said that 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were taking part, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia. The Australian Air Force also sent a search plane.
The AirAsia Flight 8501 carrying 162 people, including one Briton, lost contact with ground control over 24 hours ago during a flight from Surabaya, in Indonesia, to Singapore on Sunday – the third south-east Asian flight to end in tragedy this year.
Setiayana said visibility was good. “God willing, we can find it soon,” he told The Associated Press.
Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, having spoken to several captains, believes that the pilot was ensnared by bad weather which caused the aircraft to stall as the crew attempted to escape the thunderstorm by climbing higher.
AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished Sunday in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore, and a rescue official said Monday that given the route of the plane he believed the most likely scenario was that it crashed.
“The QZ8501 was flying too slow, about 100 knots which is about 160kmh too slow. At that altitude that’s exceedingly dangerous,” Mr Thomas told reporters.
“Based on the coordinates that we know, the evaluation would be that any estimated crash position is in the sea, and that the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea,” National Search and Rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo told a news conference.
“He got caught in a massive updraft or something like that. Something's gone terribly wrong,” he said.
The plane's disappearance and suspected crash caps an astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia. 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.
“Essentially the plane is flying too slow to the altitude and the thin air, and the wings won't support it at that speed and you get a stall, an aerodynamic stall.”
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.
Mr Thomas compared the disaster to that of the Air France AF447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, after attempting to avoid a thunderstorm.
The 43-year-old tour agent had been taking a family of four on a trip to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia's Lombok island.
In the subsequent hours, Indonesian authorities – alongside several other countries - have scrambled to assemble 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships. Boats and search planes have also been sent by Singapore, Malaysia and Australia.
“He just told me, 'Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good fortune,”' Adityas recalled, while weeping.
National Search and Rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo told a news conference yesterday: “Based on the coordinates that we know, the evaluation would be that any estimated crash position is in the sea, and that the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea”.
Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays.
Mr Soelistyo said given the route and believed last known location of the plane, it is thought the flight encountered storms and crashed.
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.
Search teams are hopeful they will find the plane, with the Naval Aviation Center commander First Admiral Sigit Setiayana commenting that visibility was good.
There was no distress signal from the twin-engine, single-aisle plane, said Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia's acting director general of transportation.
“God willing, we can find it soon,” he said.
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 increase altitude from 32,000 feet (9,754 meters) to 38,000 feet (11,582 meters), Murjatmodjo said. The jet was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m. and was gone a minute later, he told reporters.
The plane’s disappearance marks the end of a tragic year for the airline industry, which saw MH370 disappear in mysterious circumstances and MH17 crash over Ukraine.
Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia launched a search operation near Belitung island in the Java Sea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground.
Most of the passengers on the latest disappearance are Singaporean, although the British government did confirm yesterday there was a single Briton, Chi-Man Choi, on the flight, believed to have been travelling with his two-year-old daughter.
AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and told a news conference that the focus for now should be on the search and the families rather than the cause of the incident.
Tony Fernandes, the British-Malaysian founder of AirAsia, which has never yet lost a plane, described the loss as “my worst nightmare”.
“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.”
Airborne for only 42 minutes, there was no distress call received from Qz8501. The last communication was at when one of the pilots asked to increase altitude from 32,000 feet (9,754 meters) to 38,000 feet (11,582 meters).
Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane.
Indonesia's acting director general of transportation Djoko Murjatmodjo said the jet was last seen on radar at 6:16 am and was gone a minute later.
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.
Mr Fernandes asked individuals not to “speculate” adding: ““We have no idea at the moment what went wrong”.
AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
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.”
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, Iryanto, who uses one name, 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 more than 20,000 flying hours, of which 6,100 were with AirAisa on the Airbus 320. The first officer had 2,275 flying hours.
“Papa, come home, I still need you,” Angela Anggi Ranastianis, the captain's 22-year-old daughter pleaded on her Path page late Sunday, which was widely quoted by Indonesian media. “Bring back my papa. Papa, please come home.”
At Iryanto's house in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, neighbors, relatives and friends gathered Monday to pray and recite the Quran to support the distraught family. Their desperate cries were so loud, they could sometimes be heard outside where three LCD televisions had been set up to monitor search developments.
“He is a good man. That's why people here appointed him as our neighborhood chief for the last two years,” said Bagianto Djoyonegoro, a friend and neighbor.
Many recalled him as an experienced Air Force pilot who flew F-16 fighter jets before becoming a commercial airline pilot.
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.
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.
