Jakarta: Search and rescue operation for the AirAsia plane that went missing on Sunday with 162 people on board resumed on Monday morning, rescuer said.
"Some plane and helicopters have moved to the waters where the jetliner was believed to have lost since 05.30 am," Ahmad Toha, official in charge at the National Search and Rescue Agency, told Xinhua over phone.
The operation was halted at 5 pm on Sunday due to darkness at the highly suspected area on the waters near the Bangka Belitung islands, he said.
"The agency has broadcast information to ships that were passing through the waters to join in monitoring the seas and asked them to report whether they found any signs of crash,"said Toha.
The army will conduct search over land around the scene where the plane was believed to have gone missing, according to Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia's acting director general of transportation.
Flight QZ8501 lost contact with the ground staff after the air traffic control consent to the pilot's request to change flight route but it did not approve the request to increase its height to 34,000 feet, said Murjatmodjo.
The Airbus A320-200 took off from Surabaya, in Indonesia's East Java province, for Singapore.
There were 162 passengers and seven crew members on board the flight.
Head of Indonesia's National Committee of Safety Transportation, Tatang Kurniadi had expressed hope of locating the aircraft quickly and said it was too early to detect any of the so-called electronic pings from its black box recorder.
"We are using our capacity to search on sea and land. Hopefully we can find the location of the plane as soon as possible," he said.
"What I need to emphasize is until now, we have not found out how the plane fell or what kind of emergency it was."
Indonesia AirAsia is 49 per cent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia, which has had a clean safety record since it began operating 13 years ago. The AirAsia group also has affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India.
The aircraft had accumulated approximately 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights, according to Airbus.
The pilots of QZ8501 "was requesting deviation due to en-route weather before communication with the aircraft was lost," the airline said in a statement.
Singapore, Malaysia, Britain, South Korea and Australia have offered to help in the search and any investigation. Malaysia said it was sending vessels and a C130 aircraft while Singapore had also sent a C130. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a P3 Orion aircraft was on standby if needed.
Comments
0 comment