This detailed report has just come through via the Associated Press:
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.
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 talking part, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia. The Australian Air Force also sent a search plane.
Setiayana said visibility was good. God willing, we can find it soon, he told The Associated Press.
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.
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.
---------------------------------------
The Airbus A320 took off Sunday morning from Indonesias 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, Indonesias 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 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.
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.
---------------------------
AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather.
Sunardi, a forecaster at Indonesias 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.
Its 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, its not a problem.
Authorities have not said whether they lost only the secondary radar target, which is created by the planes transponder, or whether the primary radar target, which is created by energy reflected from the planes 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.
----------------------
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 regions 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.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/li...rch-for-missing-flight-resumes-at-first-light
