Fate of AirAsia flight missing with 162 on board a mystery amid fears for worst

AirAsia’s flight QZ8501 took off from Juanda International Airport in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, at 5.20am, six minutes after sunrise. The plane seated 180 but only 155 passengers were on board, allowing a few lucky ones to stretch their legs into empty adjacent seats. The flight was scheduled to arrive in Singapore about two hours later. The sky was cloudy, the air warm.

At 6.13am the pilot, an Indonesian man named Iriyanto, contacted air traffic control in Jakarta with a request: the plane was cruising at 32,000ft over the Java Sea and was approaching some bad weather. Could he rise to 38,000ft to avoid a storm cloud?

Then, mysteriously, the captain went silent. At 7.24am Jakarta air traffic controllers realised they had lost contact with the plane – Iriyanto had not sent a distress signal. Thirty minutes later, they informed their Singaporean counterparts.

At 11.41am AirAsia posted a statement to its Facebook page: “AirAsia Indonesia regrets to confirm that flight QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore has lost contact with air traffic control at 07.24hrs this morning. At the present time we unfortunately have no further information regarding the status of the passengers and crew members on board, but we will keep all parties informed as more information becomes available.”

Satellite tracking

The company’s chief executive, Malaysian-British entrepreneur

Tony Fernandes

, tweeted that he was en route to Surabaya. AirAsia changed its bright red logo to grey on social media sites.

And observers found themselves asking the same disquieting question they had asked twice already this year: in a world of satellite tracking, how can a passenger jet simply disappear?

Furthermore, AirAsia is headquartered in Malaysia, home also to Malaysia Air, which lost two planes in 2014 – one in the southern Indian Ocean, and another, four months later, allegedly shot down over Ukraine.

The Airbus A320-200 that took off on Sunday morning did not show any obvious red flags. According to Airbus it had safely logged 13,600 flights since it came off of the assembly line in October 2008. AirAsia is known for its no-frills service and excellent safety record; the company has not had a fatal accident since it was founded in 1996. Its motto is “Now everyone can fly”.

By mid-afternoon, hope of a happy ending to the mystery had begun to fade – the plane would have run out of fuel hours earlier but no wreckage or flotsam had been sighted. Singapore’s Civil Aviation Authority began contacting the passengers’ next of kin.

On board the plane were 138 adults, 16 children and one infant. The vast majority of passengers were Indonesian; three were from South Korea, one from Malaysia and a British man accompanying his two-year-old Singaporean daughter. The co-pilot, Remi Emmanual Plesel, was French.

Captain Iriyanto's nephew Doni spoke to the local press. "[My uncle] is always helping people because he is a very caring person," he told Indonesian news portal Detik. "If there is a sick relative who needed help and even money, my uncle would be there."

At Singapore’s Changi Airport, passengers went about their business – sipping coffee on layovers, scrambling to catch flights, meeting friends and relatives at arrival gates – as an electric sign ominously instructed family members of QZ8501 passengers to gather at a “relatives holding area” to wait for briefings.

By late afternoon, 47 friends and relatives of 57 passengers had checked in. Police cordoned off the area and shooed away packs of reporters.

Louise Sidharta (25) had been en route to the airport in Surabaya when she heard news of the missing jet on the radio. She suspected that her fiance, Alain Oktavianus Siaun, was on the plane with his parents and three brothers – the couple were to marry in May and had planned to meet that afternoon for a pre-wedding holiday in Singapore. Sidharta caught her 1.25pm flight but by the time she emerged into the press scrum at Changi she knew that Siaun and his family were among the missing.

Sidharta maintained "a strong front", the Malaysia Star reported, and "advised the family members of other passengers on the flight to stay strong and keep away from negative thoughts". She told reporters: "We have to stay positive and hope that they could be found soon."

Family members

In Indonesia, family members gathered at the airport in Surabaya anxiously seeking updates on their phones. “I hope for a miracle and may God save them all,” a bespectacled young man told Indonesian broadcaster

tvOne

. “I should have gone with them but I cancelled [my flight] two weeks ago. I have two friends and they went with five family members.”

The man began to cry. “Yes, I planned to spend the new year of 2015 in Singapore,” he said, struggling to speak. “The morning before I went to pray one of them called me and said: ‘See you in new year and see you forever.’”

Indonesian authorities began to zero in on a possible crash zone near Belitung, a rugged island of white sand beaches and tin mines in the Java Sea, off the coast of south Sumatra.

The Indonesian air force dispatched two planes and a military helicopter; Malaysia and Singapore both lent C130 aircraft to the search, four-engine turboprops that could fly low over the turquoise water. The Indian navy put ships and aircraft on standby.

“We are following the track of the plane so are flying north,” an Indonesian airforce spokesman told AFP. “The weather is quite good. However, we only have a few hours more to go as our fuel will run out after eight hours. By then it will also get dark.”

Search called off

Australia’s prime minister,

Tony Abbott

, called Indonesian president Joko Widodo to express condolences for the loss of the plane. He said Australia “would do whatever [it] humanly could” to help.

At 5.30pm, as the sun set over Indonesia, authorities called off the search effort. It would begin again today at 7am, a transport ministry official told reporters – earlier if the weather remained good.

After nightfall, AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes, apparently having arrived in Surabaya, began tweeting again. He exhorted his staff to “pray hard”, to “do whatever we can” and to keep a positive attitude.

"I am touched by the massive show of support especially from my fellow airlines," he wrote. "This is my worst nightmare. But there is no stopping." – (Guardian service)