KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 29 — Just nine months after Flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared, another passenger plane associated with a Malaysian brand name went off the radar yesterday without a trace.
But in the news reports that compare the disaster between the two airlines have arrived at a common conclusion: Indonesia AirAsia QZ8501’s Airbus has a far higher probability of being found.
Finding the plane’s last location
In both cases, unverified claims of wreckage belonging to the lost plane popped up early in the initial stages of the search operations.
Until today, however, not a single trace of MH370 has been found despite a massive search for the Boeing jetliner that vanished on March 8 carrying 239 people on board.
Indonesia said yesterday that the last known location of the QZ8501 is believed to be between the Indonesian port of Tanjung Pandan and the Pontianak town in West Kalimantan, roughly the same area mentioned by unverified reports of an unidentified plane’s crash.
Steven Wallace, former director of a US government unit probing air-borne accidents, said search teams looking for the Indonesia AirAsia plane would have an easier task compared to those searching for the MH370.
“It will not surprise me if this airplane is found in the next 12 hours of daylight, because they know to a fairly high degree of certainty where it was, the water is 150 feet deep as opposed to 10- or 20,000 feet deep in the Indian Ocean,” Wallace, who previously headed the US’s Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Accident Investigations, was quoted saying by CNN yesterday.
CNN also pointed out that the challenges of searching in the southern Indian Ocean, where the seabed believed to be MH370’s final resting place was largely uncharted territory.
On the other hand, analysts believe the QZ8501 would likely only be in a part of the shallower ocean that sees heavy traffic, the cable news broadcaster said.
In a separate report by ABC News, aviation expert John Nance also said it would be easier to look for the QZ8501 in the shallower waters of the Java Sea, saying: “It’ll be easier because it’s very well mapped”.
Intrigue in the vanishing act
Recapping the MH370 case, CNN said there appeared to be deliberate switching off of the plane’s transponders, with radio communication stopped and the plane’s possible continued flight after it made an unexplained turn from its flight path.
CNN said questions over terrorism and hijackings had been raised in the MH370 case, but cited an aviation expert that pointed out the QZ8501 pilot as having weather-related difficulties.
“In this case you had normal communications with the pilot, a line of weather that appeared to be pretty difficult, severe, and he was asking to climb as high as he could to get out of it,” Peter Goelz, a former National Transportation Safety Board official, was quoted saying.
The New York Times (NYT) similarly said focus has been turned on the bad weather conditions in the QZ8501 case, noting that there were reported formations of cumulonimbus clouds and several lightning strikes along the Indonesia AirAsia plane’s case.
In contrast, there was clear skies and no known turbulence in the MH370 case, NYT said.
Unlike the MH370 case where it was believed that someone had manually disabled automated communication systems within the plane’s cockpit, no indicators point to similar action by QZ8501’s crew members, the paper said.
Flight QZ8501, which carried one Malaysian on board, vanished from radar at 6.18am local time yesterday amid stormy weather enroute to Singapore from Surabaya in Indonesia.
On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Malaysian, one Singaporean, one Frenchman and one Briton, comprising 155 passengers and seven crew members.
Indonesia resumed search operations for the missing jet early this morning.
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