Search Continues for Missing Indonesian Jet
Wednesday, December 31st, 2014December 31, 2014
The first two bodies from the AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crash today arrived back in the Indonesian city of Surabaya. Relatives are providing DNA samples to help identify the victims as they are returned. Flight QZ8501, en route from Surabaya to Singapore, disappeared on December 28. On board were 137 adult passengers, 18 children, including an infant, along with 2 pilots and 5 crew members.
Officials believe the crash was caused by turbulent weather. Around 40 minutes after takeoff, the pilot requested permission to change course due to stormy conditions. There was no further contact with air traffic controllers, and the AirAsia pilots sent no distress signal.
Bodies and debris were first discovered yesterday in the Java Sea off Borneo. There has been no confirmed sightings of the Airbus A320-200 fuselage, and bad weather continues to hamper further salvage efforts.
AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed into the Java Sea on December 28. Over the last decade, the death rate in airplane crashes across Indonesia has been 25 times higher than that in the United States. UN Auditors determined that Indonesian authorities have not kept up with the ever-growing popularity of air travel as flying replaces ferry journeys in a nation made up of many islands. (World Book map; map data © MapQuest.com, Inc.)
In May, a team of United Nations auditors visited Indonesia to rate the country’s aviation safety record. They came to a troubling conclusion: Indonesia had chronic aviation safety problems; and it has not kept up with the ever-growing popularity of air travel as flying replaces the ferry journeys that Indonesians use to take across a country consisting of 17,000 islands. Arnold Barnett—a Massachusetts Institute of Technology statistician specializing in aviation—has noted that the death rate in airplane crashes across Indonesia during the past decade was 25 times higher than that in the United States. “To assert that the disparity is only a coincidence or manifestation of bad luck would be preposterous,” stated Barnett.
