AirAsia flight 8501 victims were found holding hands

Indonesian search officials have now confirmed they have located the fuselage of AirAsia flight 8501 on sonar radar, upside down on the sea floor. Officials from Basarnas, Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, say the plane wreckage has been located in 24 to 30 metres of water and one of the seven confirmed recovered bodies was wearing a life jacket. Before darkness fell in the area, search teams had also identified a shadow that they believed to be the plane’s fuselage.

 

It comes amid revelations from a pilot involved in the search, that three people killed on the AirAsia flight were holding hands when their bodies were spotted floating in the Java sea off Indonesia.

Lieutenant Airman Tri Wobowo, who co-piloted the C130 Hercules aircraft that first saw debris of the plane on Tuesday, told Indonesian newspaper Kompas: ‘There are seven to eight people. Three [of them] again hold hands.’

Since the wreckage from the plane was discovered off the coast of Borneo Island, after three days of searching, there have been a number of different body counts from several official sources.

However, the chief of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, Bambang Sulistyo, has confirmed that seven bodies have been recovered including two males, along with one female who was wearing a flight attendant uniform.

He said half of those found were male and half female, including the flight attendant.

On Wednesday, divers were deployed, but heavy rain and clouds grounded helicopters, Sulistyo said.

A public memorial service for the victims will be held in Surabaya on Wednesday night local time, and New Year Eve celebrations have been cancelled, the BBC reported.

‘Now we are focused on praying for the victims,’ East Java governor Soekarwo, who goes by one name, told the BBC.

‘This is a big tragedy for Indonesia and we will do our best for the victims and their families.

Divers and ships will now search the wreckage for the all-important black boxes of the doomed plane, after officials confirmed that the bodies and debris found are from flight 8501.

Aviation experts thought the fuselage would be easily found as the aircraft most likely only broke up when it hit the water.

The Airbus A320-200 was 42 minutes into its flight from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore on Sunday when it vanished with 162 people on board.

Several pieces of red, white and black debris – including luggage, a plane door and an emergency slide – were were spotted in the Java Sea near Borneo island on Tuesday.

A 38-year-old Indonesian fisherman, Mohammed Taha, was reportedly the first person to spot any wreckage – despite the multi-million dollar air-search for the jet.

Mr Taha spotted metal objects in the water but didn’t know a plane was missing until he returned to his home in the village of Belinyu on Monday, Indonesian news website Tempo reported.

‘I found a lot of debris – small and large – in the Tujuh islands,’ Mr Taha said.

‘The largest was four metres long and two metres wide. They were red coloured with white silver. It looked like the AirAsia colours.’

The bodies were found in the Java Sea about 10 kilometres from Flight 8501’s last communications with air traffic control.

Search leader Bambang Sulistyo said at the time: ‘As the search and rescue coordinator, I can 95 per cent confirm [this is] debris and objects from the plane. The five per cent is simply because I haven’t seen personally seen them.’

Indonesian President Joko Widodo also confirmed plans to visit both the crisis center in Surabaya and the suspected crash location near Pangkalan Bun.

AirAsia group chief executive Tony Fernandes said on Twitter: ‘My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ 8501. On behalf of AirAsia my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am.’

Fernandes has told Indonesia’s President that he believes the crash was caused solely by bad weather.

Despite the black box recorder having not yet been found, Mr Fernandes said there was ‘some very unique weather conditions in the area at the time’.

He then added:’We cannot make any assumptions about what went wrong. All I can say is that the weather in south-east Asia is bad at the moment,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

At a press conference later in the day he added: ‘This is a scar with me for the rest of my life…There is at least some closure as opposed to not knowing what’s happened and holding out hope.’

There were no immediate reports of any survivors, although the presence of a life raft might raise hopes people survived the crash.

A British national, named as Chi Man Choi, according to reports of the passenger manifest in the Indonesian media, is among those on board the plane.

He is thought to have been travelling with his daughter Zoe on tickets bought on Boxing Day.

Mr Chi is believed to hold a British passport but to have lived in Singapore with his family.

The recovery of the seven bodies came as devastated relatives of AirAsia crash victims collapsed in grief and were taken to hospital after an Indonesian television station showed disturbing uncensored footage of the corpses floating in the sea.

Images shown on a news channel showed at least one body floating in the water, causing the victims’ relatives – who were watching live reports at crisis-centre at Juanda International Airport in Surabaya – to burst into tears, with some fainting and requiring hospital treatment.

The decision to broadcast the uncensored images on live television has led to severe criticism of news channel TV One.

Grieving friends and relatives of passengers sat sobbing quietly into tissues an gazed into thin air as they took in the news and realized that the ‘bodies could be their relatives.

Police officers had to be drafted in to stop press from entering the building, according to Time Magazine.

The bodies were seen from a helicopter and were taken to an Indonesian navy ship.

Navy spokesman Manahan Simorangkir said several victims were found while Air Force spokesman Hadi Tjahjanto said at least one body had been found.

Earlier, Indonesia National Search and Rescue spokesman Yusuf Latif said an Indonesian military aircraft saw white, red and black objects, including what appeared to be a lifejacket, off the coast, about 105 miles south of Pangkalan Bun.

A massive international search effort has been launched since Flight 8501, an Airbus A320-200 with 155 passengers and seven crew aboard, disappeared from radar over the Java Sea near Belitung island.

The US, China, Australia, Malaysia and Thailand have all been involved in the search, with local fishermen helping.

The news of the sighting of the debris came within two hours of it being revealed that family members were intending to fly over the search area on Sunday so they could pray for those who were missing.

It was not immediately clear whether that charter flight will now go ahead as officials said that viewing the debris would be likely to cause great anxiety.

The items are expected to be picked up by helicopters and flown to a search and rescue co-ordination post on Belitung Island,lying between the southern tip of Sumatra Island and the south of Borneo.

Earlier on Tuesday, search jets were dispatched to Long Island, part of the Indonesian archipelago, to investigate a smoke sighting as they hunted for the aircraft,CNN reported.

While the smoke sighting could have been one of many things, Dr Max Ruland, Director of Operations for the search and rescue mission, confirmed to CBS News that two Cessna jets had been dispatched.

The Airbus A320-200 lost contact at about 6.17am local time en route from Surabaya, in Indonesia’s east Java, to Singapore after the crew requested a change of flight plan due to stormy weather.

Aviation experts have revealed veteran pilots usually avoid the area known as the ‘thunderstorm factory’ where AirAsia Flight 8501 went missing because of its catastrophic storms.

Strategic Aviation Solutions chairman Neil Hansford told Channel 9’s Today most flights went around the area and somebody ‘dropped the ball’ when they made the flight plan for QZ8501.

Australia added an extra plane in its contribution to the search on Tuesday.

Two RAAF P3 Orion planes with specialist equipment are now part of the international hunt to find the aircraft. Their search is focused to the west of the island of Kalimantan, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said.

The US navy also agreed to join the multi-national search operation on its third day and have reportedly sent USS Sampson to assist.

A statement from the Pentagon said Indonesia had requested their help and their assistance ‘could include some air, surface and sub-surface detection capabilities’.

Day three of the search saw the operation expand to land, including the western part of West Kalimantan province, National Search and Rescue Agency chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo confirmed.

Dozens of planes and ships focused their search on two patches of oil spotted in Indonesian waters on Monday as a senior official warned the aircraft was likely at the ‘bottom of the sea’. But the patch later emerged to be a coral reef, 9News reported.

Mr Soelistyo said an Indonesian corvette – a warship – was sent to test the spills.

It has also emerged one of the pilots on-board the missing flight had been denied a request to increase altitude to avoid storm clouds minutes before it disappeared.

In the last communication with air traffic control, six minutes before it vanished off radar, a pilot asked permission to turn left and climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet due to the adverse weather.

But the request could not immediately be granted because another plane was in the airspace at 34,000 feet, Bambang Tjahjono, director of the state-owned company in charge of air-traffic control, said.

By the time clearance could be given, Flight 8501 had disappeared, he added.

AirAsia’s fleet of short-haul jets was already being fitted with upgraded tracking devices, but the A320 jetliner had not yet been modified when it went missing, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Waters in the search area, which is roughly the size of California, are not particularly deep at between 130 feet and 160 feet.

In Singapore on Tuesday, people were beginning to make comparisons with the early days of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which lost contact in March this year and has remained missing, with aviation experts concluding that it had probably gone down in the southern Indian Ocean.

A widespread search of the South China Sea where it last made contact failed to turn up anything other than debris and oil slicks that, officially, were not linked to the aircraft.

Mr Thomas said this should not happen in an A320, so it appears as though it was related to extreme weather conditions.

‘He got caught in a massive updraft or something like that. Something’s gone terribly wrong,’ he said.

The scenes of grief at Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport and in Beijing where MH370 was due to land are now being repeated among relatives and friends in Singapore and Surabaya.

At a centre set up for relatives of the passengers in Surabaya, anger was growing at the lack of information.

Referring to the search teams, Franky Chandra, who has a sibling and three friends on the AirAsia flight, said: ‘We only need clear information every hour on where they are going.

‘We’ve been here for two days but the information is unclear. That’s all we need… information.’

Speculation on the cause of the plane’s disappearance has centred on weather, speed and an older radar system.

Aviation experts have speculated that the flight may have encountered ‘black storm cells’ which caused a build-up of ice on airspeed senors known as pitot tubes.

A similar scenario was blamed for the Air France disaster when Flight AF447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 while en route from Rio De Janeiro to Paris.

Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas spoke to several check captains and believes the pilot of QZ8501 encountered difficult weather conditions but flew too slow in his efforts to avoid it.

‘The QZ8501 was flying too slow, about 100 knots which is about 160 km/h too slow. At that altitude that’s exceedingly dangerous,’ Mr Thomas said.

‘Pilots believe that the crew, in trying to avoid the thunderstorm by climbing, somehow have found themselves flying too slow and thus induced an aerodynamic stall similar to the circumstances of the loss of Air France AF447 to crash in 2009.’

‘I have a radar plot which shows him at 36,000 feet and climbing at a speed of 353 knots, which is approximately 100 knots too slow … if the radar return is correct, he appears to be going too slow for the altitude he is flying at,’ Mr Thomas said.

‘Essentially the plane is flying too slow to the altitude and the thin air, and the wings won’t support it at that speed and you get a stall, an aerodynamic stall.’

The A320, while sophisticated, is not equipped with the latest radar, Mr Thomas said.

The radar used by the A320 can sometimes have problems in thunderstorms and the pilot may have been deceived by the severity of these particular ones.

The latest technology radars, which were pioneered by Qantas in 2002, can give a more complete and accurate reading of a thunderstorm, but they will not be certified for the A320 until next year.

‘If you don’t have what’s called a multi-skilled radar you have to tilt the radar yourself manually, you have to look down to the base of the thunderstorm to see what the intensity of the moisture and the rain is, then you make a judgment of how bad it is.

‘It’s manual, so it’s possible to make a mistake, it has happened,’ Mr Thomas explained.

In a separate development, Earth Network, a firm that monitors weather conditions around the world, recorded a number of lightning strikes ‘near the path’ of the plane when it disappeared on Sunday morning, it was reported by the New York Times.

Although unlikely to have caused structural damage to the A320, lightning can affect navigation systems and flashes could temporarily disorient pilots, the paper notes.

Sudden shifts in wind direction also have the potential to force jet engines into a stall, although experts this scenario is very unlikely and point to the fact that the Airbus A320 is certified to fly up to three hours on a single engine.

AirAsia confirmed there were 155 passengers on board – including 138 adults, 16 children and one infant – and also stated there were two pilots, four flight attendants and one engineer on board.

Nationalities of passengers and crew on board are one Singaporean, one Malaysian, one British, one French, three South Koreans and 155 Indonesians.

The last communication from the cockpit to air traffic control was a request by one of the pilots to increase altitude from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet because of the rough weather.

Air traffic control was not able to immediately grant the request because another plane was in airspace at 34,000 feet, said Bambang Tjahjono, director of the state-owned company in charge of air-traffic control.

By the time clearance could be given, Flight 8501 had disappeared, Tjahjono said. The twin-engine, single-aisle plane, which never sent a distress signal, was last seen on radar four minutes after the last communication from the cockpit.

Search efforts for the plane’s wreckage resumed on Monday at first light and were focused around the area of the Java Sea near Belitung.

The brother of a British man who was travelling on the passenger jet missing off the coast of Indonesia has said the wait for news is ‘unbearable’ as the family prepares ‘for the worst’.

Earlier, the billionaire CEO of AirAsia described missing flight QZ8501 as his ‘worst nightmare’ as the massive air and sea search for the plane resumed at first light on Monday.

Tony Fernandes spoke of his horror over the situation after the plane lost contact with air traffic control, a short time after the pilot asked to deviate from the flight path due to ‘bad weather’.

Upon first arriving in Indonesia, Mr Fernandes gave a press conference to family and friends of those on board the plane and said the focus should be on the search and the families.

The 50-year-old built AirAsia from a small, heavily indebted company to a huge low-cost airline after buying it for just 50 cent in 2001. He later expanded into long-hail flights with the AirAsia X brand.

The fishing boats and official vessels that were sent out by Indonesia’s national search and rescue authority, along with helicopters and Hercules aircraft from Singapore, set out again at sunrise on Monday morning.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott offered the nation’s help to assist in the search on Sunday.

Despite comparisons of QZ8501 to this year’s earlier Malaysia Airlines tragedies, Mr Abbott said the AirAsia flight’s disappearance was a tragedy but ‘This is not a mystery like the MH370 disappearance and it’s not an atrocity like the MH17 shooting down’.

MH370 disappeared in March while on its way from Malaysia to China when it lost contact. The aircraft has not been seen since.

Five months later, MH17 was flying over Ukrainian airspace when it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. All 298 people on board the flight died.

Mr Abbott was speaking on Macquarie Radio on Monday, adding: ‘It’s an aircraft that was flying a regular route on a regular schedule, it struck what appears to have been horrific weather and it’s downed’.

The Australian Defence Force deployed a RAAF AP-3C Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft to assist on Monday.

Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin said the aircraft had ‘a well-proven capability in search and rescue and carries maritime search radar coupled with infra-red and electro-optical sensors’.

The pilot of the AirAsia plane has been named as Captain Iriyanto, while the co-pilot is believed to be Frenchman Remi Emmanual Plesel.  A picture of the pilot has been posted on social media by his daughter Angela Ranastianis.

Cpt Iriyanto’s nephew told Indonesian news outlet Detik.com his uncle, who is married with two young children, was ‘a very caring person’.

‘He is always helping people because he is a very caring person. If there is a sick relative who needed help and even money, my uncle would be there,’ the relative said.

‘If there are money problems in the family, he would surely help.

A family including a groom-to-be and his parents and brother were reportedly among those onboard.

Fox News reported Alain Oktavianus Siaun and his family were intending to enjoy one last holiday together before he married.

His fiancee Louise Sidharta told The Star in Malaysia she was trying to stay positive.

She said: ‘I heard it on the radio and immediately browsed the Internet and saw the news.

‘My heart knew by then that my fiancé was on that flight.’

But Ms Sidharta said she would not give up.

‘We have to stay positive and hope that they [loved ones] could be found soon,’ she said.

The British passenger aboard the missing AirAsia flight was travelling with his two-year-old Singaporean daughter after other family members got an earlier flight from Indonesia, it is believed.

It is thought the British father, named as Chi Man Choi, and his daughter Zoe, were returning to Singapore and planned to reunite with the young girl’s Singaporean mother, who travelled on an earlier flight from Surabaya, in Indonesia, with Zoe’s older brother.

Mr Choi, who is believed to be from Hull in Yorkshire originally and who graduated from the University of Essex, was the managing director at an energy company in Indonesia.

He purchased his plane ticket and that of his daughter’s on Boxing Day – according to the passenger manifest – and they were seated in the first row, in seats 1B and 1C.

The Foreign Office was unable to formally confirm the British national’s identity but confirmed a Briton was on board and next of kin had been informed.

A spokesman said: ‘We are aware of an incident regarding AirAsia flight QZ8501.

‘Our thoughts are with the passengers’ families as they await further news.

‘We have been informed by the local authorities that one British national was on board.

‘Their next of kin has been informed, and we stand ready to provide consular assistance.’

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Jakarta said it was working with local authorities to establish further details.

It is believed the three South Koreans on the plane were Park Seong-beom, 37, his wife Lee Kyung-hwa, 36, and their 12-month daughter Park Yuna.

According to officials at Yeosu First Presbyterian Church, the couple had been sent to Indonesia as Christian missionaries and were travelling to Singapore to renew their visas.

According to Indonesia’s Director of Air Transport, Djoko Murjatmodjo, contact with the aircraft was lost between Tanjung Pandan and Pontianak, a trading port city in west Kalimantan about 100 nautical miles south east of Tanjung Pandan.

AirAsia Indonesia announced the flight’s disappearance via a statement on Facebook which said: ‘[It] regrets to confirm that flight QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore has lost contact with air traffic control at 07.24hrs this morning’.

‘At the present time, we unfortunately have no further information regarding the status of the passengers and crew members on board, but we will keep all parties informed as more information becomes available,’ it said.

‘At this time, search and rescue operations are in progress and AirAsia is cooperating fully and assisting the rescue service.’

It later issued a statement confirming it had set up emergency briefing rooms for family members of the missing passengers at both airports.

Sunu Widyatmoko, chief executive of AirAsia Indonesia, said: ‘We are deeply shocked and saddened by this incident.

‘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.

‘We will do everything possible to support them as the investigation continues and have already mobilised a support team to help take care of their immediate needs, including accommodation and travel arrangements.’

Tatang Zaenudin, deputy of personnel at Basarnas, said that the agency was working to approve flights from Australia to aid with the huge operation to locate the plane, reported The Sun Herald.

AirAsia changed the colour of its logo from red to grey as a mark of respect to the missing plane.

The aircraft was an Airbus A320-200 with the registration number PK-AXC.

An A320 pilot writing on the aviation forum Aviation.net said the weather as the AirAsia flight headed north east was ‘nasty’ but he believed that it would not be enough to cause a major structural failure.

‘While the weather on the route looks rather nasty, I have always found that the A320 is a really solid aircraft in turbulence,’ the pilot, writing from Canada, said

‘I’ve flown it through bad winter storms, tropical thunderstorms and all sorts of combined weather and I’ve never felt that the aircraft was being held together on a hope and a prayer.’

Other crew members lost along with the pilot and co-pilot were four flight attendants are listed as Wanti Setiawati, Khairunisa Haidar Fauzi, Oscar Desano and Wismoyo Ari Prambudi as well as technician Saiful Rakhmad.

On Christmas Eve, Desano wrote on Twitter: ‘Merry Christmas to all my beautiful friends who celebrate it.’

He also posted a picture of himself wearing his AirAsia identification tag.

AirAsia flies mostly in the South East Asian area, its reach being as far as Sydney and the Queensland Gold Coast.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has issued a statement to Fairfax Media, saying it was checking with the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and the Australian High Commissioner in Singapore to see if any of the passengers were holding an Australian passport.

‘Those concerned about the welfare of their Australian family and friends who were known to be travelling on this flight should contact the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s 24-hour Consular Emergency Centre on 1300 555 135 (or +61 2 6261 3305 if calling from overseas),’ the statement read.

The United States also offered to help with the search.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said: ‘Our hearts and hopes are with the passengers and families of AirAsia QZ8501.’

Mailonline

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