stick around so we can come back to you to continue this conversation as more details come in to us. mary, we thank you. we turn now to richard quest, cnn s aviation correspondent, who joins us on the phone. richard, it s hard to believe that the year is not out yet, we re talking about another missing aircraft. we don t know the details here, but an airasia flight has lost contact with air traffic controllers. what jumps out at you right now? well, what will jump out at me, aisha, is first of all the moment of flight this will have happened. we need to know a lot of details about the moment of flight, where it was headed, the condition of the aircraft, as mary was saying, any warnings. it doesn t appear to be a pan pan. it doesn t appear to be a mayday. what flight level was the plane at? according to some reports it was at altitude at the time. there are these reports that it had requested a different routing to its destination. so these are pieces of the
out at me, and first and foremost is there was an unusual request for unusual route requested, and some people have questioned whether weather might come into play. ordinarily, the pilots would get the updated weather from air traffic control and of course their on-board radar. so whether there was weather in the area would not be a mystery. so i would immediately question whether weather was a factor. and requesting an unusual route will certainly raise some suspicion. before you take oft pilots have to have alternate safety routes, and they program them into their flight computers and they have their alternative safety routes already preprogrammed and preplanned before they take off. so if it was some kind of on-board emergency you would have expected to have heard either what s called a mayday call or a pan pan call. mayday means you re immediately in danger of losing the flight. pan pan means that it s urgent, you can continue the flight and request an alternate route or an alterna
this ability of satellite tracking on the plane can actually do it. so what we don t know at this point, whether this aircraft had that kind of capability. but we do have the advantage right now to track it on radar. and the airbus 320, give us a little back story to it. its safety record. this is a plane that works hard, works tirelessly, flies all over the world. that s right. the 320 is a workhorse. it s basically in use around the world. it doesn t have any particul particular if you had any kind of mechanical mayday, in an emergency a pilot is trained to let air traffic control know about that. so it s disconcerting that they did not pass on that kind of information right off the bat. you re trained in flight school, when i was trained, first thing you do if you re having difficulty is tell air traffic controllers what your difficulty is. so now that they know it s missing hopefully they won t