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On the first month anniversary of the crash, we look back at the events of the past 30 days
JAKARTA, Indonesia – On the morning of December 28, 2014, a routine AirAsia flight from Surabaya, East Java, to Singapore with 155 passengers and 7 crew members disappeared amid stormy weather.
What followed over the next 30 days was an Indonesia-led international search and rescue effort that managed to recover 70 of the 162 victims and retrieve parts of the wreckage. Faced with strong currents and uncooperative weather conditions, the search and rescue operation is nevertheless widely regarded as having been carried out well, with families of victims themselves expressing appreciation for the hard work of all those involved.
On the first month anniversary of the crash, we look back at the events of the past 30 days:
On December 28, 2014, AirAsia Indonesia-Singapore flight QZ 8501 went missing “at 07:24hrs (Sunday) morning,” AirAsia initially announced, referring to GMT+8. But Indonesian Transport Ministry officials later said it lost contact a few minutes before that, at 6:17 am (GMT+7).
The pilot asked to ‘deviate’ due to bad weather. “Last contact was with the Jakarta tower, pilot requested permission to avoid clouds and fly to 38,000 feet,” Transport Ministry official Djoko Murdjatmodjo said. “The plane is in good condition but the weather is not so good.”
The flight had 155 passengers, including 17 children and 1 infant, plus 7 crew members (two pilots, an engineer, and 4 flight attendants): 155 Indonesians, 3 South Koreans, 1 Malaysian, 1 British, 1 French, 1 Singaporean.
The complete passenger manifest released by the Indonesian Transportation Ministry includes 23 names who did not check in for the flight.
AirAsia had no major accident or plane crash on record, up until the disappearance of flight QZ8501.
Faced with his first major crisis, Malaysian mogul Tony Fernandes, who transformed a floundering carrier into Asia’s biggest budget airline, quickly flew to Surabaya, where most of the families of the passengers on board were.
Search and rescue operations led by the Indonesian military and SAR teams of Indonesia and Singapore focused on an area between Belitung island and Kalimantan, the plane’s last known position.
‘Papa, come home’: Relatives of people aboard missing AirAsia flight QZ 8501 are getting anxious as the search for the plane is suspended on the evening of day 1.
On Tuesday, December 30, bodies and debris were found around 160 kilometers (100 miles) southwest of the town of Pangkalan Bun in Central Kalimantan. It’s the first confirmation that the plane had indeed crashed.
Relatives of people on board learned about the discovery of the debris at a holding room of the Surabaya Airport. Many are distraught and some faint from the news and are rushed to the hospital.
By New Year’s Day, 7 bodies had been retrieved, and relatives began burying their victims. Indonesian rescuers promised an “all-out effort” to search for the rest of the victims and international investigators joined attempts to locate the fuselage of the ill-fated plane.
On January 2, the body of flight attendant Khairunisa arrived in her hometown of Palembang, escorted by AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes himself.
Indonesian recovery teams narrowed the search area for AirAsia Flight 8501 on January 2, hopeful they were closing in on the plane’s crash site, with a total of 30 bodies and more debris recovered from the sea.
On January 7, the tail of the plane was located.
After a few failed attempts, the mangled tail of the plane was lifted out of the Java Sea on January 10.
On January 13, Indonesian divers retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from beneath the wreckage of the plane, a day after the plane’s other black box, the flight data recorder, was recovered. The devices should provide investigators with vital information about what caused the accident.
On January 14, Singapore Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen announced on his official Facebook page that the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia jet has been located by a Singaporean vessel.
After several failed attempts, divers on January 22 managed to go near the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia jet. AFP reported that Indonesian divers found 5 bodies still belted into their seats near the fuselage.
On January 27, a day before the one-month anniversary of the crash, the Indonesian military called off efforts to recover the wreckage after failing to find any more bodies inside the fuselage. Only 70 of the 162 passengers had been found.
– Rappler.com
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