Plane with 162 missing; ferry with 478 burning

While the search and rescue (SAR) operations for AirAsia Flight QZ8501 was suspended as night fell, the world is anxiously waiting for another similar operation to save passengers in a burning ferry off the Greek island of Corfu.

(Also read AirAsia flight to Langkawi makes U-Turn)

Indonesia has suspended the search for a missing AirAsia plane that disappeared in bad weather en route from Surabaya to Singapore.


The search halted at 5.30pm on Sunday (1030 GMT) as night fell, but would resume at 7am on Monday, or even earlier if the weather was good, Indonesian transport ministry official Hadi Mustofa said.

Panicked families of the passengers and crew members gathered at Changi and Surabaya airports, waiting for latest news of the incident (pic).

The Airbus A320-200, carrying 162 people, went missing after air traffic controllers lost contact with the twin-engine aircraft around an hour after it left Juanda international airport at Surabaya in East Java at 5:20am on Sunday (2220 GMT Saturday).
Shortly before disappearing, AirAsia said pilots of the plane had asked permission from Jakarta air traffic control to change course and climb above bad weather in an area noted for severe thunderstorms.
The airline, giving a revised breakdown of nationalities, said 155 of those on board Flight QZ8501 were Indonesians, with three South Koreans and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia, Britain and France.
Sixteen of those on board were children and one was an infant.

In Greece, AFP reported that desperate passengers pleaded via mobile phone to be saved from a burning ferry (pic below), the Norman Atlantic, off the Greek island of Corfu last night as rescuers battled gale-force winds to get to them.


Further to the west, three seamen were missing, feared drowned after a Turkish-registered merchant ship sank off Italy following a collision with another vessel in rough seas.

Off Corfu, win gusts of up to 100 kilometres an hour were making rescue difficult and dangerous, and the crew early today had only managed to get 150 of the 478 people off the stricken Norman Atlantic, Greek officials said.

Freezing passengers huddled on the top deck of the ship told of their terror in calls to Greek television stations.
“We are on the top deck, we are soaked, we are cold and we are coughing from the smoke. There are women, children and old people,” passenger Giorgos Styliaras told Mega TV.
Another told the station that “our shoes were melting” from the heat of the fire when they were mustered in the ship’s reception area.
Seas were so violent that only 35 of those have so far been lifted from a lifeboat to a tanker that came to their aid, Greek Marine Minister Miltiadis Varvitsiotis said hours into the emergency.
He said seven merchant vessels have encircled the ferry in an attempt to shelter it from force-10 winds, as Greek and Italian firefighting vessels raced from their coasts.
Italian navy spokesman Riccardo Rizzotto said four helicopters were already at the scene and the ship’s captain had told coastguards that the ferry was now drifting towards the Albanian coast.
“The weather conditions are so bad we need an extraordinary level of support, which is effectively what is being put in place,” he said.

The Norman Atlantic had left the Greek port of Patras on Saturday and had been heading to the Italian port of Ancona when the fire took hold.

According to rescued passengers, the intense heat rapidly affected the rest of the ship. However, passengers stranded on the top deck of the ship later seemed to be more worried by the storm, telling Greek TV the flames were subsiding.

Neither ANEK Lines nor the ship’s owners had made any comment.

NOTE:Let us all pray for them and their families. 'Semoga Tuhan selamatkan mereka semua...amin!'