21.45 An Indonesian family who had been scheduled to take the missing Air Asia flight has told how they narrowly missed boarding after cancelling their holiday the day before.
Chandra Susanto was booked on flight QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore with his wife Inge Ferdiningsih and three children Christopher,10, Nadine, seven, and Felix, five, when his father became ill and they postponed the trip.
20.30 While the disappearance of the Air Asia flight may seem bizarre, Alastair Rosenschein, a former BA pilot, says that there are rarely any real mysteries in aviation.
Missing Asia Airlines jet will not be a mystery
He writes:
Second, the onboard Electronic Transmitter, or ELT, is designed to broadcast an aircraft’s position after ditching in the sea, and does not automatically trigger after an accident.
And third, radar contact is maintained by line of sight: it will not register a distant aircraft at ground or sea level.
This leaves the black box, or Flight Data Recorder (FDR) beacon which, as we should all know following the MH370 disappearance, only has a range of up to five-and-a-half miles and a battery life of 30 days. Only with the right equipment and a considerable amount of luck can a plane be located through these transmissions.
There are also numerous reasons for the perceived delay by the Indonesian authorities in declaring an emergency and triggering a search and rescue operation.
20.00 It's 4am in Southeast Asia, and the search will resume in two hours time.
To recap - Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are involved.
The US and Australia have also volunteered to help.
19.49 It's the early hours of the morning in Singapore and Indonesia, and we are expecting the search to resume at 6am local time.
18.53 It was only a matter of time until a Fox News host asked the question to which we've all been wanting to know the answer: Did the plane disappear because of confusion over metric and imperial systems?
During breaking coverage of missing Flight QZ8501, Anna Kooiman asked former FAA spokesperson Scott Brenner if the “real reason” the plane had disappeared was because of the “different way other countries train their pilots.”
It’s kilometers or miles. You know, everything about their training could be similar, but different.
It’s not just a difference in the way that we measure things?
Is it not as safe in that part of the world? Because our viewers may be thinking, ‘International travel, is it safe? Is it not safe?’
Mr Brenner attempted to reassure her that confusion over imperial and metric systems would have had nothing to do with the disappearance.
18.13 This summary of everything we know so far about the weather system at the time the flight disappeared, produced by Mashable, is well worth a read.
Andrew Freedman writes:
• Weather — from fog to thunderstorms — is a contributing factor in the majority of aviation accidents, including the disappearance of an Air France Airbus A330 off the coast of Brazil in 2009.
• A large area of disturbed weather, including areas of intense thunderstorms with cloud tops that reached or exceeded the AirAsia flight's cruising altitude, were likely in the vicinity of the plane when it disappeared. Unusually heavy rainfall has caused widespread flooding in parts of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia in the past week.
• The flight's pilot requested a turn to avoid bad weather ahead of the plane, which is a standard procedure for when flights encounter poor weather and turbulence.
18.00 Rescuers are due to resume their search for the missing Air Asia flight in four hours time.
You can read how the news broke on Sunday here:
Air Asia missing plane: Sunday December 28 as it happened
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