Year-end panic as AirAsia A320-200 with 162 on board goes missing

#A320200 #AirAsia #Indonesia #Singapore #MH370 An Airbus A320-200 of AirAsia en-route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore with 162 people aboard lost contact with air traffic control about an hour before it was to land and is missing. The crew included two pilots, four flight attendants and one engineer. This has been confirmed by officials of AirAsia Indonesia.
The crew of the Airbus A320-200 It was the Flight QZ8501 that took off from Juanda International Airport and lost contact with air traffic control at about shortly before it was to land at Singapore.
As revealed by Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia's acting director general of transportation, the pilot of the plane lost contact with the air traffic control shortly after the pilot asked to avoid a cloud bank by turning left and going higher to 34,000 feet.
There was no distress signal from Flight QZ8501 - the distance between Surabaya and Singapore is about 860 miles and the contact was lost about 42 minutes after takeoff from Surabaya airport. It seems at that time, the plane was believed to be over the Java Sea between Kalimantan and Java islands. The weather in the area was cloudy.
The plane was carrying 155 passengers, including 138 adults, 16 children and an infant and most of them were Indonesian nationals. However, there also were one passenger each from Singapore, Malaysia and France and three from South Korea. This is another mysterious disappearance of a flight similar to the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 which went missing shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur.