An AirAsia plane with 162 people on board lost contact with ground control while flying over the Java Sea after taking off from a provincial city in Indonesia for Singapore.
The two countries immediately launched a search and rescue operation but there was no word on the plane’s whereabouts more than six hours after it went missing.
AirAsia, a regional low-cost carrier with presence in several south-east Asian countries, said in a statement that the missing Airbus A320-200 was on the submitted flight plan route.
However, it had requested deviation due to weather before communication with the aircraft was lost while it was still under the control of the Indonesian Air Traffic Control.
“We don’t dare to pressume what has happened exceped that it has lost contact.” Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation, told reporters.
He said the last contact between pilot and the air traffic control was at 6.13am local time (11.13pm GMT Saturday) “when he asked to hinder cloud by turning left and go higher to 34,000 feet”.
He said there was no distress signal from Flight QZ8501.
The contact was lost about 42 minutes after the single-aisle jetliner took off from Indonesia’s Surabaya airport, Hadi Mustofa, a transport ministry official told Indonesia’s MetroTV.
It was about an hour before it was scheduled to land in Singapore at 12.30am GMT.
Mr Murjatmodjo said the pilot contacted Jakarta air traffic control at 6.12am local time reporting clouds and asking to go higher from 32,000 feet to 34,000 feet, the usual cruising altitude for jetliners.
The Singapore statement said search and rescue operations have been activated by the Indonesian authorities. It said the Singapore air force and the navy also were searching with two C-130 planes.
Flightradar24, a flight tracking website, said the plane was delivered in September 2008, which would make it six years old.
The circumstances bode well for finding the plane since the intended flight time was less than two hours and there is a known position at which the plane disappeared, according to William Waldock, a US expert on air crash search and rescue.