More than 9 hours after losing contact with the AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501 en route to Singapore from Indonesia, search operations ...
More than 9 hours after losing contact with the AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501 en route to Singapore from Indonesia, search operations coordinated by Indonesia continues in the Java Sea.
Preliminary analysis indicate, bad weather en route could have caused the airplane to crash. By now airplane is several hours past the time when its fuel would have been exhausted.
AirAsia said the aircraft was on the submitted flight plan route and was requesting deviation due to enroute weather before communication with the aircraft was lost while it was still under the control of the Indonesian Air Traffic Control (ATC).
The last communication with the QZ8501 was when pilot requested Jakarta ATC permission to ascend to 38,000 feet from 32,000 feet due to bad weather.
CNN's meteorologist Derek Van Dam said, bad weather was in the region at the time, but that necessarily couldn't bring a plane down. The Airbus A320 is a proven and reliable aircraft with over thousand delivered.
Live flight tracking site Flightradar24 reports QZ8501 was flying at 32,000 (FL320), while other aircraft in same area were flying on FL340-FL390.
The flight was carrying a total of 162 people, including 155 passengers, 5 cabin crew and 2 pilots.
The airplane lost contact with air traffic control at 07:24 (Surabaya LT) this morning. The flight took off from Juanda International Airport in Surabaya at 0535 hours and was slated to land at Changi Intl airport in Singapore.
