Passengers’ relatives, right, are still waiting to learn the fate of AirAsia Flight 8501 and the 162 people aboard the missing plane.
SURABAYA, Indonesia — Search planes and ships from several countries on Monday were scouring Indonesian waters over which an AirAsia jet carrying 162 people disappeared, and more than a day into the region’s latest aviation mystery, officials doubted there could be anything but a tragic ending.
AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished Sunday in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. The search expanded Monday, but has yet to find any trace of the Airbus A320.
“Based on the coordinates that we know, the evaluation would be that any estimated crash position is in the sea, and that the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea,” Indonesia search and rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo said at a news conference.
First Adm. Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Center commander at the Surabaya air force base, said 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were taking part in the search, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia. The Australian Air Force also sent a search plane.
The plane’s disappearance and suspected crash caps a tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia. The Malaysia 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.
Flight 8501 took off Sunday morning from Indonesia’s second-larg- est 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 twinengine, 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 6:12 a.m., when one of the pilots asked to increase altitude from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet, Murjatmodjo said. The jet was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m. and was gone a minute later, he said.
AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane. 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.