Devastated families of 162 fliers await news

JAKARTA: An astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia turned worse Sunday when an AirAsia plane carrying 162 people disappeared over stormy Indonesian waters, with no word on its fate despite several hours of searching by air and sea. AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished in airspace possibly thick with dense storm clouds, strong winds and lightning on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Searchers had to fight against heavy rain. 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, shocked family members pored over the plane’s manifest, crying and embracing when they learned the news. 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 Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, and was about halfway to Singapore when it vanished from radar. Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation, said there was no distress signal from the cockpit of the twin-engine, single-aisle plane. The last communication between the pilot and air traffic control was at 6:13 a.m. (2313 GMT Saturday), when the pilot “asked to avoid clouds by turning left and going higher to 34,000 feet,” Murjatmodjo said. It was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m., and a minute later was no longer there, he said. Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia launched a search and rescue operation for Flight 8501 near Belitung island in the Java Sea, the area where the jetliner lost contact with ground traffic control about 42 minutes after taking off from Surabaya. AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and said at a news conference that the focus should be on the search and the families rather than the cause of the incident. Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane before. “This is my worst nightmare,” Fernandes tweeted. But Malaysia itself had already had 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. Flight 8501 was operated by AirAsia Indonesia, a subsidiary that is 49 percent owned by AirAsia Malaysia. The plane had an Indonesian captain and a French copilot, five cabin crew members and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, AirAsia Indonesia 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.   AGENCIES