AirAsia plane believed to have crashed in sea

Search and rescue operation for the AirAsia plane that went missing on Sunday with 162 people on board resumed on Monday morning, rescuer said."Some plane and helicopters have moved to the waters where the jetliner was believed to have lost since 05.30 am," Ahmad Toha, official in charge at the National Search and Rescue Agency, told Xinhua over phone.The operation was halted at 5 pm on Sunday due to darkness at the highly suspected area on the waters near the Bangka Belitung islands, he said. "The agency has broadcast information to ships that were passing through the waters to join in monitoring the seas and asked them to report whether they found any signs of crash,"said Toha.The army will conduct search over land around the scene where the plane was believed to have gone missing, according to Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia's acting director general of transportation.

On the missing plane's likely location, Soelistyo, head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, said, "Based on our coordinate estimation, initial estimation is in the water."

"It can be expanded based on evaluation," he told reporters on Monday.

Flight QZ8501 lost contact with the ground staff after the air traffic control consent to the pilot's request to change flight route but it did not approve the request to increase its height to 34,000 feet, said Murjatmodjo.The Airbus A320-200 took off from Surabaya, in Indonesia's East Java province, for Singapore.There were 155 passengers and seven crew members on board the flight.

With Indonesia AirAsia 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia, the incident caps a disastrous year for Malaysia-affiliated airlines.

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew and has not been found. On July 17, the same airline's Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

Indonesian Air Force spokesman Hadi Thahjanto said two C-130 Hercules planes were focusing the search for Flight QZ8501 in areas northeast of Indonesia's Bangka island, which lies roughly halfway between Surabaya and Singapore, in the Java Sea.