Plane took off six minutes after sunrise and was meant to arrive two hours later; at sunset the search was suspended

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

AirAsia’s flight QZ8501 took off from Juanda international airport in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, at 5.35am, shortly after sunrise on Sunday. The plane seated 180 but only 155 passengers were on board, allowing a few to stretch their legs into empty adjacent seats. The flight was scheduled to arrive in Singapore about three hours later. The sky was cloudy, the air warm.

Indonesian authorities said that, at 6.13am, the pilot - an Indonesian man named Iriyanto - contacted air traffic control in Jakarta with a request: the plane was cruising at 32,000ft over the Java sea and was approaching some nasty weather. Could he rise to 38,000ft to avoid a storm cloud?

Then, mysteriously, the captain went silent. The flight was last seen on radar at 6.16am and was gone a minute later, the Indonesian acting director general of transportation Djoko Murjatmodjo told reporters. Iriyanto had not sent a distress signal, he said.

AirAsia’s chief executive, the Malaysian-British entrepreneur Tony Fernandes, tweeted that he was en route to Surabaya. Fernandes is also chairman of the English Premier League football club QPR.

On its Facebook page, AirAsia Indonesia wrote: “We are very upset over this incident. As we are coordinating with all relevant authorities in order to determine the cause of this incident.”

The company added that it would “provide full support in line with the process of investigation”.

AirAsia changed its bright red logo to grey on social media sites. And observers found themselves asking the same disquieting question they had already asked once this year: in a world of satellite tracking, how can a passenger jet simply disappear?

Furthermore, AirAsia is headquartered in Malaysia, home also to Malaysia Airlines, which has lost two planes in 2014 – one in the southern Indian Ocean, and another, four months later, shot down over Ukraine.

The Airbus A320-200 that took off on Sunday morning did not show any obvious problems. According to Airbus, it had safely logged 13,600 flights since it came off the assembly line in October 2008. AirAsia is known for its no-frills service and excellent safety record; the company has not had a fatal accident since it was founded in 1996. Its motto is: “Now everyone can fly.”

By mid-afternoon, hope of a happy ending to the mystery had begun to fade – the plane would have run out of fuel hours earlier but no wreckage or flotsam had been sighted. Singapore’s civil aviation authority began contacting the passengers’ next of kin.

Among the passengers on board were 138 adults, 16 children and one infant. Most were Indonesian; three were from South Korea, one from Malaysia, and one was a British man accompanying his two year-old Singaporean daughter. The co-pilot, Remi Emmanual Plesel, was French.

Captain Iriyanto’s nephew Doni spoke to the local press. “[My uncle] is always helping people because he is a very caring person,” he told the Indonesian news portal Detik.com. “If there is a sick relative who needed help and even money, my uncle would be there.”

At Singapore’s Changi airport, passengers went about their business – sipping coffee on layovers, scrambling to catch flights, meeting friends and relatives at arrival gates – as an electric sign ominously instructed family members of QZ8501 passengers to gather at a “relatives holding area” to wait for briefings.

By late afternoon, 47 friends and relatives of 57 passengers were waiting in the holding area, which had been cordoned off by police.

Louise Sidharta, 25, had been en route to the airport in Surabaya when she heard news of the missing jet on the radio. She suspected that her fiance, Alain Oktavianus Siaun, was on the plane with his parents and three brothers. The couple were to marry in May and had planned to meet on Sunday for a pre-wedding holiday in Singapore.

Sidharta caught her 1.25pm flight, and by the time she emerged into the press scrum at Changi knew that Siaun and his family were among the missing.

Sidharta maintained “a strong front”, the Malaysia Star reported, and “advised the family members of other passengers on the flight to stay strong and keep away from negative thoughts”.

She told reporters: “We have to stay positive and hope that they could be found soon.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Indonesia’s Air Transportation Department holds a news conference on Sunday.

In Indonesia, family members gathered at Surabaya airport anxiously seeking updates on their phones. “I hope for a miracle and may God save them all,” a bespectacled young man told the Indonesian broadcaster tvOne.

“I should have gone with them but I cancelled [my flight] two weeks ago. I have two friends and they went with five family members.”

The man began to cry. “Yes, I planned to spend the new year of 2015 in Singapore,” he said, struggling to speak. “The morning before I went to pray and one of them called me and said: ‘See you in new year and see you forever.’”

Indonesian authorities began to zero in on a possible crash zone near Belitung, a rugged island of white sand beaches and tin mines in the Java sea, off the coast of south Sumatra.

The Indonesian air force dispatched two planes and a military helicopter; Malaysia and Singapore both lent C130 aircraft to the search. The four-engine turboprops are ideal for flying low over the water. The Indian navy put ships and aircraft on standby.

“We are following the track of the plane so are flying north,” an Indonesian air force spokesman told AFP.

“The weather is quite good. However we only have a few hours more to go as our fuel will run out after eight hours. By then it will also get dark.”

Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, called Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, to express condolences. He said Australia “would do whatever [it] humanly could” to help.

At 5.30pm, as the sun set over Indonesia, authorities called off the search effort for the day. It would begin again at 7am on Monday, a transport ministry official told reporters – earlier if the weather remained good.

After nightfall, AirAsia CEO Fernandes, apparently having arrived in Surabaya, began tweeting again.

He exhorted his staff to “pray hard”, to “do whatever we can” and to keep a positive attitude.

“I am touched by the massive show of support especially from my fellow airlines,” he wrote. “This is my worst nightmare. But there is no stopping.”