A member of the Indonesian military looks out of the window during a search and rescue (SAR) operation for missing Malaysian air carrier AirAsia flight QZ8501.Juni Kriswanto/AFP / Getty Images
A modern airliner's abrupt disappearance from radar as it flew through a line of equatorial thunderstorms – with no distress call received – points to another in-flight "loss of control" aviation disaster.
On Monday, as hopes of finding survivors of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 faded, searchers in ships and aircraft scoured the Java Sea looking for debris to pinpoint where the Singapore-bound Airbus A320 crashed.
(AirAsia Flight 8501: What we know so far about the plane's disappearance)
Nearly two days after the flight vanished, chances of finding anyone alive, even if some of the 162 passengers and crew survived a crash into the sea, were exceedingly remote, but officials were still calling the multinational effort a search-and-rescue operation.
The fate of Flight 8501 remains perplexing and until the cockpit voice and flight-data recorders are recovered, investigators won't be able to determine what exactly went wrong during the plane's final few minutes.
Airline incidents and fatalities since: 1975
However, the loss of the airliner invites comparison with the 2009 crash of Air France's Flight 447. That crash killed all 228 on board the Paris-bound flight from Rio de Janeiro as it flew directly into a line of tropical thunderstorms.
In the Air France crash, all three pilots, including a veteran captain and two less-experienced co-pilots, were so spatially disoriented that they were still arguing over which way was up when the Airbus A330 slammed into the sea. In just over four minutes, the undamaged and perfectly flyable aircraft fell more than 11 kilometres. The flight's autopilot had disengaged because of faulty airspeed readings, forcing the pilots to manually fly the aircraft.
On Monday, two oil patches in the Java Sea east of Belitung island, close to Flight 8501's last known position, were located by Indonesian air-force helicopters. Several other debris findings were discounted as being unrelated to the missing Airbus.
Hadi Tjahnanto, a senior Indonesian air-force officer, told MetroTV that the slick samples were being analyzed to determine if they came from Flight QZ8501.
The search seems certain to shift to a recovery effort soon, focused on finding the flight data recorders that should hold clues as to why a modern, sophisticated jetliner, piloted by an experienced crew working for a major regional carrier with an unblemished safety record, apparently flew straight into the sort of severe thunderstorms routinely found near the equator.
Massive thunderstorms are common in the tropics and pose a routine, albeit serious, challenge to flight crews. Modern jet airliners can survive even the most severe turbulence and multiple lightning strikes without structural failure, but flight crews are trained to fly around severe storms. Deviation around, rather than over, is standard procedure and considered safer, since some tropical thunderstorms can reach far higher than commercial jetliners can fly.
The disappearance of Flight 8501 over the weekend caps a catastrophic year for Malaysian aviation, with three major crashes in unrelated occurences. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, disappreared on March 8 with 239 on board. It has never been found and may have been deliberately flown until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the remote south Indian Ocean. On July 17, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, another Boeing 777, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from pro-Russian rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
On Monday, the flamboyant Malaysian founder of the AirAsia group, the low-cost airline with affiliates in half-a-dozen countries, spoke about the loss of Flight 8501. "My heart bleeds for all the relatives of my crew and our passengers," Tony Fernandes said. "Nothing is more important to us. Until today, we have never lost a life. But I think that any airline CEO who says he can guarantee that his airline is 100-per-cent safe is not accurate."
Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo ordered an immediate review of all aviation procedures.
Most of the passengers on Flight 8501 were Indonesians, headed for Singapore on vacation – a two-hour flight from Surabaya, the country's second-largest city.
At dawn on Sunday morning, about 50 minutes after takeoff, the twin-engined Airbus A320 was already at its planned cruising altitude and nearly halfway to Singapore, when one of its two pilots asked air-traffic control for permission to climb from 32,000 to 38,000 feet, perhaps in an attempt to climb over severe weather directly ahead. The request was denied because of other aircraft already occupying the higher flight altitudes. A few minutes later – at 6:17 a.m. local time – controllers offered Flight 8501 permission to climb to 34,000 feet, but there was no reply. The twin-engine, single-aisle plane was last seen on radar four minutes after the final communication. Some flight-tracking sites record the last data from its transponder – the device on board modern aircraft that broadcasts position, speed, altitude and flight number – at very low altitude.
"Based on the co-ordinates that we know, the evaluation would be that any estimated crash position is in the sea," Indonesia search-and-rescue director Henry Bambang Soelistyo said.
Search aircraft and ships from several countries converged on a 100-square-kilometre area between the island of Belitung, off Sumatra, and Borneo. The Java Sea is less than 100 metres deep where the aircraft vanished, which should make recovery of the flight recorders easier.
In Southeast Asia, the AirAsia group has redefined flying with a focus on low-cost, no-frills flights in a rapidly growing market. Its distinctive fleet of more than 160 red-and-white-painted Airbus A320s, with "Now Everyone Can Fly" emblazoned on the undersides, has become a familiar sight in Southeast Asian skies.
Indonesia AirAsia, run by and 49-per-cent owned by the Malaysian AirAsia parent company, has another 28 Airbus A320s, each capable of seating 180 passengers. It was one of those aircraft that is missing and presumed lost at sea.
Mr. Fernandes flew to Surabaya on Monday, saying that until the investigation was completed it was premature to speculate on whether procedures or crew training needed to be changed.
On board the missing flight were 155 passengers, including 17 children and an infant. A crew of seven – two pilots, four flight attendants and, unusually, a flight engineer – were assigned to the flight.
The captain, Iriyanto, an Indonesian who uses only one name, was a former Indonesian air-force fighter pilot with more than 20,537 flying hours, of which 6,100 were on Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320s. "Papa, come home, I still need you," Angela Anggi Ranastianis, his 22-year-old daughter, pleaded in social-media comments.
The co-pilot was Rémi Emmanuel Plesel, a French citizen who gained his pilot's licence at age 42 and had 2,275 hours on the Airbus A320.
Usually, one pilot flies a flight segment while another operates the radios and communicates with air-traffic control. It's not yet known which pilot was handling the flight. However, in case of difficulties or unforeseen problems, the captain can, and usually does, take control.