An AirAsia flight has gone missing after it took off in treacherous weather Saturday morning with 155 passengers.
According to USA Today, Flight [QZ]8501 was headed to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia when it lost contact with air traffic control. The incident happened at 7:24 a.m. (6:24 p.m. ET on Saturday.) Search parties went on a hunt for clues, but haven't found any details on the flight. Tony Fernandes, a Malaysian businessman and CEO of AirAsia released a statement about the incident, asking people not to the dive into conspiracy theories about the flight's disappearance.
"We have no idea at the moment what went wrong," said Fernandes. "Let's not speculate at the moment."
Indonesia's acting director general of transportation, Djoko Murjatmodjo, says the pilot asked to pass a cloud bank by going an additional 35,000 feet. Flight [QZ]8501 has a total of 155 passengers with 17 children and one infant. The majority of the passengers are Indonesians with three South Koreans, a Singaporean, a Briton and a Malaysian.
On Monday, Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean officials plan to search the Java Sea in the area where the flight took off and search near the Indonesian city of Surabaya.
The flight is the third plane to face a horrific disaster in Malaysia after the disappearance of another flight earlier this year and another that was shot down during Ukraine's internal conflict.
Source: USA Today
