Indonesia search and rescue chief says estimated crash position is in the sea, and that the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea
Search planes and ships from several countries on Monday, were scouring Indonesian waters over which an AirAsia jet carrying 162 people disappeared, and more than a day into the region’s latest aviation mystery, officials doubted there could be anything but a tragic ending.
AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished Sunday in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. The search expanded Monday, but has yet to find any trace of the Airbus A320.
“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,” Indonesia search and rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo said at a news conference.
First Adm. Sigit Setiayana, the NavalAviationCenter commander at the Surabaya air force base, said 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were taking part in the search, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia.
The Australian Air Force also sent a search plane. Searchers had to cope with heavy rain Sunday, but Setiayana said Monday that visibility was good.
“God willing, we can find it soon,” he said.
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.
“He just told me, ‘Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good fortune,’” Adityas recalled, while weeping.
Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays. Flight 8501 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 increase altitude from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet, 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 operation near Belitung island in the JavaSea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground. AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and said at a news conference that the focus for now 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.”
