A MASSIVE sea search was underway for an AirAsia plane that disappeared yesterday while flying from Indonesia to Singapore with 162 people on board through airspace possibly thick with dense storm clouds, strong winds and lightning, officials said.

    More than 12 hours later, shocked family members huddled at the Surabaya airport, from where the Airbus A320 had taken off, awaiting any news of the jetliner operated by an airline whose parent company is based in Malaysia. It is the third incident involving Malaysia this year following two of the worst aviation tragedies that hit Malaysia Airlines — in March Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people and in July Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, with all 298 people on board killed.

    Indonesia and Singapore launched a search and rescue operation for Flight 8501 near Belitung island in Java Sea, over which the jetliner lost contact with ground traffic control, about 42 minutes after taking off from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city. The flight had completed a little less than half of its journey time to Singapore.

    “We hope we can find the location of the plane as soon as possible, and we hope that God will give us guidance to find it,” Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation, said. “We don’t dare to presume what has happened except that it has lost contact.”

    He said the last communication between the pilot and air traffic control was at 6:13 a.m. when the pilot “asked to avoid clouds by turning left and going higher to 10,360 meters.” It was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m., and a minute later was no longer there, he said.

    He said there was no distress signal from the cockpit of the twin-engine, single-aisle plane.

    AirAsia, which has a presence in most of Southeast Asia and recently in India, has never lost a plane before and has a good safety track record.

    The plane had an Indonesian captain and a French co-pilot, five cabin crew and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, AirAsia Indonesia said in a statement. Among the passengers were three South Koreans and one each from Singapore and Malaysia. The rest were Indonesians.(SD-Agencies)Family members of passengers on board AirAsia flight QZ 8501 talk on their phones while waiting for information inside a crisis center at Juanda Airport in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, yesterday.SD-Agencies

    Malaysia-based AirAsia, which has dominated cheap travel in the region for years, flies short routes of just a few hours, connecting large cities of Southeast Asia. However, recently it has tried to expand into long-distance flying through its sister airline AirAsia X. AirAsia Malaysia owns 49 percent of its subsidiary, AirAsia Indonesia.

    (SD-Agencies)