Ships, planes resume search for AirAsia jet
SURABAYA, Indonesia — The search for a missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people that disappeared more than 24 hours ago on a flight from Indonesia to Singapore resumed with first light Monday. First Admiral Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Center commander at the Surabaya air force base, said that 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were talking part, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia. Setiaya said visibility was good. “God willing, we can find it soon,” he told The Associated Press. AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished in airspace thick with clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Searchers had to fight against heavy rain on Sunday before work was suspended due to darkness. The plane’s disappearance and suspected crash caps an astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia. 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. Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore. 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. (5:13 p.m. Chicago time Saturday), 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.