The fate of an AirAsia Indonesia flight that lost contact with air traffic control over the Java Sea early Sunday morning with 162 people aboard remains a mystery more than 16 hours after it disappeared in course to avoid bad weather, the Associated Press reported. The plane had been in the air for about 41 minutes when contact was lost.
Flight QZ 8501, traveling from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore, disappeared early Sunday morning, prompting Indonesia to quickly launch a massive search and rescue operation in order to locate the missing plane, the airline confirmed. But by Sunday night, the daylong search had been halted for the day, with the plane still unaccounted for.
The search will resume Monday morning, Indonesian Air Transport Director Djoko Murjatmodjo said during a news conference on Sunday.
"We have no idea at the moment what went wrong," said Tony Fernandes, a Malaysian businessman and CEO of the regional low-cost carrier he founded in 2001. "Let's not speculate at the moment."
At 7:24 Singapore time on Sunday morning (6:24 p.m. EST on Saturday), Airbus 320-200 lost communication with Indonesia's Surabaya Juanda International Airport shortly after the plane's pilots requested "deviation due to en-route weather," AirAsia said in a statement.
The pilot had also requested to increase altitude to 38,000 feet from 32,000 feet to "avoid clouds" since thunderstorms were reported in the area with clouds up to 50,000 feet, BBC News reported.
"The weather was not good -- it was bad -- at the estimated location the plane lost contact," Indonesian Transport Ministry official Hadi Mustafa said, adding that the flight, which lost contact somewhere between Kalimantan on Borneo island and Belitung island, was scheduled to land in Singapore at 7:57 a.m. local time.
While ground control in Jakarta approved the pilot's request to divert the flight, the request to raise elevation hadn't been approved before losing contact with the plane, said Murjatmodjo.
"It's hard to say if 34,000 feet would have been enough," AccuWeather meteorologist Tyler Roys told USA Today. "We know the thunderstorms were very tall, very high up. They could have encountered severe turbulence, strong wind shear, lightning and even icing at that altitude."
No distress signal had been sent, the ministry's air transportation director Joko Muryo Atmodjo said, adding, "Therefore we cannot assume anything yet."
Currently, the six-year-old aircraft is several hours past the time when its fuel would have been exhausted, Murjatmodjo said, adding that teams were searching the sea and mountainous areas in the region.
"We are deeply shocked and saddened by this incident," AirAsia Indonesia CEO Sunu Widyatmoko said in a Facebook post. "We are cooperating with the relevant authorities to the fullest extent to determine the cause of this incident. In the meantime, our main priority is keeping the families of our passengers and colleagues informed on the latest developments."
The plane has six Indonesian crew, a French crew member and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant. Among the passengers are three South Koreans, a Singaporean, a Malaysian and a British person. The rest are Indonesians, the statement said.
The captain in command had a total of 6,100 flying hours and the first officer had a total of 2,275 flying hours, according to the airline, according to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia offered to assist the search for the plane. A U.S. National Transportation Safety Board spokesperson said that the agency is "ready to assist" the rescue team if needed.
"We are coordinating with [the] rescue team and looking for its position. We believe it is somewhere between Tanjung Pandan, a town on Belitung island, and Kalimantan,"Atmodjo said .
The disappearance of the AirAsia flight is the third air incident of 2014 that involves Malaysia.
Malaysia's national carrier, Malaysia Airlines, suffered two disasters in 2014. In March, the airline lost contact with flight MH370 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew aboard. It remains missing. In July, flight MH17 was downed over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people.