INDONESIA’S AIR WOES
May 2012: A Russian-made Sukhoi Superjet-100 slams into a volcano during a demonstration flight in Indonesia, killing all 45 people on board. Information recovered from the plane's cockpit-voice and flight data recorders indicated the pilot in command was chatting with a potential buyer just before the plane slammed into dormant Mount Salak in West Java province.
January 1995: A flight operated by Indonesia-based Merpati Nusantara Airlines disappears over open water while flying between islands in the archipelago nation. The de Havilland Twin Otter 300 with 14 passengers and crew was never found.
— Associated Press
AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore.
The Malaysia-based carrier’s loss comes on top of the still-unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July over Ukraine.
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, and had been happy to get the work.
“He just told me, ‘Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good fortune,’” Adityas recalled, holding her grandson tight while weeping.
Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays.
The Airbus A320 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., when one of the pilots “asked to avoid clouds by turning left and going higher to 34,000 feet (10,360 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 the island of Belitung in the Java Sea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground.
The air search resumed this morning, said Achmad Toha of Indonesia’s search-and-rescue agency. Some ships continued looking for the aircraft overnight, he said.
AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and told a news conference that the focus 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. “Let’s not speculate at the moment.”
Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane.
“This is my worst nightmare,” Fernandes tweeted.
But Malaysia itself has already endured a catastrophic year, with 239 people still missing from Flight 370 and all 298 people aboard Flight 17 killed when it was shot down over rebel-held territory in Ukraine.
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AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather.
Sunardi, a forecaster at Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said dense storm clouds were detected up to 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.
“It’s 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, it’s not a problem.”
It was unclear based on comments from authorities what air traffic controllers saw on their screens when the plane disappeared from radar, he noted.
The plane had an Indonesian captain 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.
Indonesia’s search-and-rescue head, Bambang Soelistyo, said his agency would search today with 12 ships and three helicopters, along with five military aircraft and a number of warships.
Malaysia and Singapore each planned to deploy one C-130 plane and three ships. Australia will also help, he added.
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.
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