AirAsia Flight Goes Missing After Call For Course Shift

AirAsia Flight QZ8501 Goes Missing After Call for Course Shift

Rescuers scouring Indonesian waters for an AirAsia plane that went missing with 162 people aboard have found no sign of the missing jet more than 16 hours after it lost contact with air-traffic control, officials said Sunday.

After more than 10 hours of scouring the Java Sea, Indonesian authorities called off the aerial search for the night and said it would resume at 6 a.m. Monday (6 p.m. ET Sunday). Achmad Toha of Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) said some ships in the area would continue looking for the missing plane overnight, according to The Associated Press.

AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control at around 7:24 a.m. local time in Indonesia (7:24 p.m. ET) on Sunday after requesting a course change due to bad weather while en route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore.

Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation, Djoko Murjatmodjo, said there had been no distress signal from the cockpit of the Airbus A320-200, but a minute before contact was lost, the pilot “asked to avoid clouds by turning left and going higher to 34,000 feet.” Forecasters told NBC News that “numerous showers and hail” littered the missing jet’s flight path.

“We hope we can find the location of the plane as soon as possible, and we hope that God will give us guidance to find it,” Murjatmodjo told reporters. “We don’t dare to presume what has happened except that it has lost contact.”

The flight had 155 passengers on board, including 16 children and one infant, and two pilots and five crew members, the airline said. Most on board were Indonesian though there were around six foreigners — including three South Koreans, a British national, a Singapore national and a Malaysian. A French national was part of the crew, according to AirAsia.

“The aircraft was on the submitted flight plan route and was requesting deviation due to en route weather before communication with the aircraft was lost,” the airline said, adding that the missing plane last underwent maintenance on Nov. 16, and the pilot has a total of 6,100 flying hours.

Airbus confirmed in a statement that the plane was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008 and that it had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights.