AirAsia Flight 8501: What we know
AirAsia Flight 8501 disappeared from radar screens Sunday with 162 people aboard. Here is what we know:
• The Airbus A320 flew out of Surabaya, Indonesia, at around 5:35 a.m. local time on Sunday (5:35 p.m. ET Saturday), bound for Singapore.
• Less than 40 minutes later, the pilot radioed air-traffic control asking to increase the plane's altitude due to the weather. Heavy storms were reported in the area.
• Minutes later and about an hour before the plane was scheduled to land in Singapore, the plane lost contact with controllers and disappeared from radar.
• AccuWeather meteorologist Tyler Roys tells USA TODAY that the area along the flight path was blasted by a string of severe thunderstorms when the jet disappeared.
• Two days of searching by 30 ships and 50 aircraft failed to locate the plane or its debris. The second day's effort on Monday was called off because of darkness. The search resumed at dawn Tuesday and will be extended to include land, according to Indonesian authorities.
• The search has been focused on a 70-square-nautical-mile area between Belitung island, off Sumatra, and Borneo. The water is relatively shallow, about 150 feet deep.
• The U.S. Navy said the destroyer USS Sampson would join the search Tuesday.
• Some air crews spotted oily spots and objects in the sea Monday, but Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency ruled them out as connected with AirAsia, said Trikora Harjo, general manager of Juanda Airport.
• There were seven crewmembers and 155 passengers on board — with 138 adults, 16 children and one infant, the airline said in a statement. The passengers and crew included three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a French co-pilot, a British national and his 2-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.
• This is the third major air incident for Southeast Asia this year. On March 8, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people aboard. It remains missing. And on July 17, another Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over eastern Ukraine while on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The 298 people aboard were killed.
