Two oily spots and some unidentified objects spotted in the Java Sea by an Indonesian helicopter and an Australian search plane on Monday while searching for the AirAsia jetliner that vanished with 162 people abroad has been ruled out as being connected to the missing aircraft, an official said.
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. A day after the plane vanished, the fate of AirAsia remains a mystery as 30 ships and 50 aircrafts continue to carry out an ongoing rescue mission, the Associated Press reported.
However, an official claimed that the aircraft could be presumed to have crashed off the Indonesian coast.
"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 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.
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 Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesian Air Transport Director.
No distress signal had been sent, the ministry's air transportation director Joko Muryo Atmodjo said, adding, "Therefore we cannot assume anything yet."
On Monday morning, an Australian Orion aircraft detected "suspicious" objects near Nangka island about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off central Kalimantan, which is about 700 miles (1,120 kilometers) from the location where the plane lost contact, Jakarta's air force base commander, Rear Marshal Dwi Putranto, said.
"However, we cannot be sure whether it is part of the missing AirAsia plane," Putranto said. "We are now moving in that direction, which is in cloudy conditions."
Additionally, an Indonesian helicopter spotted two oily spots in the Java Sea east of Belitung island, much closer to where the plane lost contact, Air Force spokesman Rear Marshal Hadi Tjahnanto told MetroTV, adding that oil samples would be collected and analyzed to investigate further connections.
"There is no time limit on the operation," he said. "Of course we hope there will be survivors and pray for that. But we realize that the worst may have happened."
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 airline confirmed.
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, search and rescue teams are expected to expand their search area to include land on Tuesday after having focusing on an area of 70 square nautical miles between the island of Belitung, off Sumatra, and Borneo island, Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said.
"Until today, we have never lost a life," AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes, who founded the low-cost carrier in 2001, told reporters in Jakarta airport. "But I think that any airline CEO who says he can guarantee that his airline is 100 percent safe, is not accurate."
The disappearance of the AirAsia flight is the third air incident of 2014 that involves Malaysia, according to USA Today.
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.
