This week the Indonesian military put a stop to the search efforts for the remainder of Air Asia Flight 8501, the airplane that seemingly just disappeared much like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in early 2014. The only difference? Flight 8501 turned up just two days after it went down on December 28, 2014, in an array of wreckage and, later, bodies.
The plane departed from Surabaya International Airport in Indonesia at 5:26 AM WIB, carrying 162 people total and heading to Singapore. It disappeared from the naval radar at 6:18 AM WIB, just forty-two minutes after it took off. Four hours after the flight missed its estimated time of arrival at Singapore Changi Airport, the Indonesia National Search and Rescue Agency activated rescue missions, and Air Asia officially announced that they had lost contact with the plane later that hour.
It was later revealed that the weather was rather stormy, and after taking a sharp shift upwards, the plane stalled and then dipped and plummeted to its fate in the murky waters beneath.
A fisherman was the one who initially pointed rescuers in the right direction, and within two days, searchers had located the plane’s door and an emergency slide among much other debris in the Karimata Strait in the Java Sea. Since then, debris has been located as far as 1000 kilometers from the crash site. In total, only 70 bodies were recovered from the surrounding area.
It has been confirmed that the co-pilot had control of the plane when it went down. First Officer Rémi-Emmanuel Plesel was a 46-year-old French national with over 2,000 hours of experience, and when compared to 53-year-old Captain Iriyanto’s 20,500, the difference is drastic.
The cause of the accident has been deemed bad weather conditions. This is the second deadliest flight in Indonesian history behind Garuda Indonesia Flight 152, which crashed into the woodlands thirty miles from Medan on September 26, 1997, due to low visibility.