An Indonesian official said that missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 was likely to be “at the bottom of the sea” on Monday morning, as hopes that an elaborate international search and rescue effort would find survivors began to fade.
The jet vanished from radar screens on Sunday morning with 162 people on board, as it approached violent weather over the Java Sea about 40 minutes into a two-hour flight between the Indonesian city of Surabaya and Singapore. The plane, an Airbus A320-200 operated by an Indonesian subsidiary of the Malaysian budget airline AirAsia, reportedly requested to deviate from its flight path to avoid a cloud. Moments later, it lost contact with Jakarta air traffic controllers. It did not send a distress signal.
“Based on the co-ordinates given to us and evaluation that the estimated crash position is in the sea, the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea,” Bambang Soelistyo, Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency chief told reporters on Monday. “That’s the preliminary suspicion and it can develop based on the evaluation of the result of our search.”
Soelistyo said that “the capability of our equipment is not optimum,” adding that Indonesia would reach out to other countries including the UK, France and US for technology that might be required to retrieve the plane from the seabed. No wreckage has been found.
Indonesia began trawling a swath of the Java sea by the island of Belitung on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday, the search effort widened to include 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships, said First Admiral Sigit Setiayana of the Surabaya air force base. Setiayana added that visibility was good. “God willing, we can find it soon,” he said.
Singapore, Malaysia and Australia have also dispatched ships and planes to aid in the effort. Malaysia “has been tasked to comb an area 11,400 sq nautical miles” around the island, the country’s national news agency Bernama tweeted on Monday.
AirAsia flight QZ8501 is the third disaster involving a Malaysian carrier this year. In March, the country’s national airline, Malaysia Airlines, lost contact with flight MH370 as it was en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur; the plane has not been found, and its disappearance remains a mystery. In July, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was apparently shot down over Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.
On flight QZ8501 were seven crew members and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant. While the vast majority on board were Indonesian, the co-pilot was French, and the passengers included three South Koreans, a Malaysian, and a British man with his two year-old Singaporean daughter.
The pilot, Iryanto, who like many Indonesians only goes by one name, had logged more than 20,000 flying hours, a significant amount. “Papa, come home, I still need you,” his 22-year-old daughter Angela Anggi Ranastianis wrote to her Path page on Sunday, according to Associated Press. ”Bring back my papa. Papa, please come home.”
