On December 28th, AirAsia Flight QZ8501 left Surabaya, Indonesia on a seemingly mundane route to Singapore. Exactly 38 minutes into the flight, it disappeared in a what appeared to be a mysterious – yet eerily familiar – vanishing act.
The international media was quick to respond, and many began to draw automatic connections to the Malaysian Airlines flight that had similarly gone missing only a few months before. However, despite severe weather hindering search and rescue operations in days immediately following the disappearance, it quickly became apparent that the plane had indeed crashed somewhere in the Java Sea and a variety of international teams, including those from the US, were able to recover 34 bodies out of the 162 passengers on board.
That number has quickly risen, and though the weather has still remained poor, much has been done in terms of gathering evidence. By mid-January, divers had been able to not only recover one of the airliner’s two regulation black boxes, but were also able to identify large pieces of debris believed to be critical components of the wreckage, including what appears to be the cockpit as well as portions of the wing and fuselage. The victim count currently stands at 51, with the vast majority of the remaining 111 bodies believed to be trapped within the main fuselage. According to Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency chief, Henry Bambang Soelistyo, rescuers are currently planning to raise the fuselage, either by balloons or tugboat cranes.
Despite their best efforts however, many questions still remain unanswered. What caused this airliner to crash and what events directly contributed to this tragedy? Could this have been prevented? Who is at fault?
With the critical flight and plane data stored on our recently recovered black box, many of those questions will soon be answered. Was is certain however, is that regardless of the new information, AirAsia will have a lot to answer for. After all, the Surabaya-Singapore route that the doomed plane had been flying had not been authorized to fly on December 28th; the route had been reserved only for Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – not Sundays. It is not surprising that any requests made by the plane’s pilots to gain altitude were rebuffed by air traffic controllers because that airspace was already reserved for other, regulation-abiding airliners. By flying in a time and space not approved by traffic controllers, AirAsia forced its pilots to guide the plane straight through the heart of a vicious storm, one that many believe caused sleet to form in the engines and ultimately led to the flight’s crash.
As an airline, AirAsia has a responsibility to ensure the safety of its flight crew, pilots, and passengers, not only by providing regular servicing for its planes, but also, puling data on weather patterns and canceling flights that go through particularly dangerous areas. By going against regulations, this company betrayed the public’s trust and though it has already made efforts to compensate the families of each victim, it will have a long way to go before it can truly make any sort of amends.
Mardjono Siswosuwarno, a senior official with Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee recently announced that a preliminary report will be released by the 28th of January. For families, the public, and other airliners, all that remains is a tense waiting game.
Brian Chekal is the Editor-in-Chief of Pulse Magazine.