The air search for the missing Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 has ended with ships finding nothing in the area where aircraft had earlier reported spotting debris and an oil slick.
Australian paper Sydney Morning Herald reported today Indonesia’s transport minister Ignasius Jonan as saying that ships have gone to the area where an Australian Orion reconnaissance plane saw debris and oil in the waters 130km from Pangkalan Bun in Kalimantan, and searched a 70km radius but found nothing.
“The information is not clear yet,” Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla was quoted saying.
“It has been checked and no sufficient evidence was found to confirm what was reported,” he was later quoted saying in an AFP report.
Kalla also pointed out that it could take months or years to locate the missing passenger plane that vanished yesterday with 162 people on board, citing the still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that vanished in March, as well as the Air France Flight 447 crash in 2009 that took nearly two years to locate the wreckage of the plane.
Australia’s Fairfax Media’s Indonesia correspondent Michael Bachelard tweeted from his @mbachelard Twitter account that the air search for Flight QZ8501 was called off for the night at 4.30pm local time.
UK’s BBC producer Alice Budisatrijo tweeted from her @alicebudi Twitter account Kalla as saying that media reports of wreckage being found were unconfirmed.
Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) chief Bambang Soelistyo said earlier today that based on the plane’s final coordinates, Flight QZ8501 likely crashed in the Java Sea and was believed to be at the bottom of the ocean.
The plane disappeared five minutes after its pilot requested at 6.12am local time yesterday to climb higher from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid a cloud in stormy weather. Jakarta air traffic control had denied the pilot’s request because of heavy air traffic.
Indonesian media reported that there were four other planes flying at higher altitudes in the vicinity of Flight QZ8501 at the time.
No distress signal was detected from the Airbus A320 jet during its flight from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore.
On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Malaysian, one Singaporean, one Frenchman and one Briton, comprising 155 passengers and seven crew members.- themalaymailonline
