Airasia flight 8501. It was en route from the city there on the bottom part of your screen surabaya to singapore when it lost contact with air Traffic Control early undsunday morning. It was a short flight just under two hours long. The pilot at some point well into the flight i believe asked to change routes because of the weather. And soon afterwards contact with that airport airplane was lost. This is a picture of the plane were talking about. Its an airbus a320. We do know how many people were on that flight now. 162 on the flight manifest. Thats 155 passengers and seven cry. Most on board were indonesians with three south koreans, one singaporean, one from malaysia and one french person on board. We have also learned of the passengers 17 were children and that includes one baby. The ceo of airasia tweeted this short statement thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. We must stay strong. We havent heard from them in a while. If we get any updates from the Airline Company itself
leaving at such an early time in the morning, people can t be bothered to get up and get on the plane. so that was what i read when i saw that. but in terms of the route, very high traffic, very popular. nothing really unusual about it at all. all right. well thanks again. greg wald ronn the asian managing editor for flight global. you ve been very helpful in our breaking news coverage, and we appreciate your time and input. if you get anything else feel free to get in touch with our control room. we ll talk to you again. but thank you so much. we ll turn now to yusuf irafan. chief editor at cnn indonesia.com. thank you so much for joining us. we hear you have been monitoring some of the information coming out from the airline. and we didn t have translation earlier when they did make a brief announcement. so what have you been hearing?