This practice appears to be common for AirAsia, according to BMKG Station Chief Blucher Doloksaribu. CNN did not see AirAsia listed in entries for a logbook running from December 31 to January 6, for instance.
The airline doesn’t dispute this, explaining it gets and distributes the same information not in person but by email. The documents are printed and brought onto the flight for pilots to see, AirAsia’s Indonesia President Director Sunu Widyatmoko told CNN.
One advantage of picking up such documents personally — which in Surabaya, where Flight QZ8501 took off from December 28, would be done at the Airport Authority building — is that it gives cockpit crew or airline operations staff a chance to review it with the meteorologist on duty, ask questions and get additional information, said BMKG forecaster Apritarum Fadianika.
But AirAsia argues that the official copy actually isn’t as easy to read as the electronic version, which has the same information and comes in color.
“Our dispatch mirror the dispatch practices of numerous airlines globally,” AirAsia said in a statement.
There’s been no apparent change in how the airline gets copies of weather information since QZ8501 went down in the Java Sea. But there’s now a change in how its staff process it: Whereas pilots briefed themselves before the crash, there’s now a face-to-face briefing involving pilots and flights operations officers before each flight, AirAsia spokeswoman Audrey Petriny said.
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A locator beacon in at least one of the plane’s so-called black boxes was manufactured by Dukane Seacom, the same company that built the beacons on the still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
But the search for the AirAsia flight is markedly different than the hunt for the missing Malaysian airliner, since wreckage has already been found. Records show there are fresh batteries in at least one of the AirAsia plane’s beacons, which are designed to send out pinging sounds for 30 days after a crash to help searchers find the black boxes, Dukane Seacom President Anish Patel said.
Some of the bodies found over the weekend were still wearing seat-belts, search officials said.
The bad weather conditions brought about by Indonesia’s monsoon — including strong winds, thick clouds, heavy rain and big waves — have hindered the teams’ efforts during nine days of searching.
“As soon as you see something in the distance, it disappears behind a wave — and then it’s very difficult to try and spot it again,” said CNN’s Paula Hancocks, who spent 15 hours out on a search vessel Sunday.
How can a modern airliner vanish?
David Molko reported from Surabaya, Indonesia. Josh Gaynor and Intan Hadidjah reported from Jakarta. CNN’s Steve Almasy, Greg Botelho and Aaron Cooper contributed to this report.
