and at 7:54 a.m., singapore air traffic controllers were notified that contact had been lost. this was an air craft that took off from indonesia, making its way to singapore. should have landed at 8:30 a.m. local time. that did not happen. that aircraft has been missing for basically over 4 1/2 hours at this stage as you can imagine as we hear that there are over 100 people on this flight. we re being told as many as 162. incredibly stressful time. a worrying time for the families, relatives of those onboard. let s go to cnn s paula hancocks monitoring the situation from seoul. what can you tell us? we ve just received an updated statement from air asia. they ve confirmed the number of people onboard. it was 162 who were onboard that flight.
conditions. we know that family members of those onboard the flight could well be watching us as we have this conversation. this is obviously an extremely tense time and extremely worrying time for them. what is their air line doing right now in terms of getting information out to the general public, to those with people onboard the flight? do we know of a help line being set up? they do have a call center that s already set up. an emergency call center. they say that they are trying to help those relatives who are obviously desperately worried at this point as to exactly what has happened to this flight. certainly air asia say they are doing all they can. they say that unfortunately at this point, they simply don t know the status of the passenger and of the crew. so they are unable to give any more information at this point. they do say that as soon as they do know more, they will be giving that information. now, obviously relatives of those passengers will be
confirmation. it appears as though the vast majority of those onboard are indonesian, we understand from reports that there may be a british person onboard. there may be a singapore person onboard. there may be three koreans onboard but at this point as i say, it s not 100% confirmed so we re waiting for that information from the company itself but it does appear at this point the vast majority well over 150, 145, i should say are indonesians themselves. that is the source of this flight. it started in oiindonesia so th vast majority appear to be indonesian. this flight should have taken less than two hours. about an hour and 50 minutes. a fairly well travelled route. certainly not isolated. just a flight that would be heading north/northwest up to singapore and should have landed as i say at 8:30 a.m. loc 8:20
time. that was five hours ago. concerns are increasing. we appreciate the reporting. stand by for us. we want to recap for our viewers. there s an air asia flight to singapore is missing. a transport official says it lost contact with air traffic controllers at 7:24 a.m. that they lost contact with air traffic controllers. you heard paula say this was a flight that was supposed to land at 8:20 a.m. loc al time. the pilot requested an unusual route before the plane lost contact. we do want to stress to you that that is not confirmed. that is just what we are hearing that there was a change in the flight route r. this is a story that s developing. we re bringing the details in to you as we get them. waiting and working to get
we will be checking in with you to continue this conversation and get your perspective but i want to go to richard quest. cnn s aviation correspondent who joins us now on the phone. richard, paula was just sharing the new details with the air line confirming that the craft was requesting a deviation in the route because of weather. your thoughts. well, the first thing it tells me obviously you ve got a smoking gun. when you actually have something that is out of the ordinary you now have the airlines saying that it is, you know, that there was a deviation request. i come back to this point that the air craft wasfullying at something like 32,000 feet at the time. this is the cruise. this is the safest part of flight. for bad weather per say does not bring down aircraft.