A similar Air Asia plane. CNN/AP
An AirAsia flight, QZ8501, has disappeared over the Java Sea. CNN. The plane was traveling from Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board. Before falling off of the radar the pilot had requested to deviate from the flight path in order to avoid bad weather. Shortly after all contact was lost. No mayday or other information was transmitted. Bad weather has hurt efforts to locate the plane as naval vessels from Indonesia and Malaysia scour the area. The missing plane comes 11 months after the disappearance of another flight in Southeast Asia, Malaysia Airlines flight 370. That flight has still not been found.
My Comment:
As always in these situations I am hoping for the best but expecting the worst. The fact that the plane fell off of radar so quickly without sending out any kind of distress signal indicates to me that something terrible likely happened. It was most likely due to the weather. If there is any good news at all it is that the place where this plane dispersed in is a busy shipping channel. Unlike flight 370, this plane crashed in an area where there are a lot of civilian activity. It is little solace for the people who have loved ones on flight QZ8501, but at least we should be able to find out what happened in this case, with any luck at all.
And 2014 seems like it will go down for bad one as far as aviation is concerned. Quite a few plane crashes happened this year and many of them got a ton of media coverage. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and flight 17 got a ton of coverage and they weren't the only air crashes. Still, it is important to note that air travel is still largely safe. These are isolated incidents and are not representative of aviation as a whole. It only seems like a terrible year for aviation because the accidents that did happen got a ton of attention. CNN seemed to talk about flight 370 for months and flight 17 was a major international incident. These disasters are the exception to the rule.
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