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The search for the missing aircraft suspended. well have a live report coming up. images are heartbreaking as families wait helplessly for answers. on the right side of the screen, a picture from the airport. instead of the arrived onmessage was a different one. and the airbus 320 is one of the safest planes in the sky, but how safe are they? well tell you on "fox & friends" right now. and right to the fox news alert. the search for a plane packed with people suspended. this after 162 soul...

Built airplane. the airplane has not shown any likelihood of metal fatigue, so i dont believe that that will be an issue. theres certainly nothing in the fleet history to indicate that. so with the kind of history, extensive history that the a-320 has had and the maintenance being having been performed on schedule and routinely by airasia, i certainly -- this is something that the investigators will look at but this airplane has a good solid history, based on my experience with it as well well. ...

>> we have lost connection with paula hancocks who was joining us on the line from seoul. as paula made clear to us, this is a developing news story that is developing. details are hard to come. let me reset for you the breaking news, that an airasia flight en route from the indonesian city of surabaya to singapore is missing. an indonesian transport official telling cnn that flight 8501 lost contact with air traffic controllers early sunday morning. the pilot reportedly -- this is not confirmed...

Around severe weather, being thunderstorms and monsoonal rain showers that are ever so common across this area. they want to make natalie, that flight for you and i and everybody watching us as comfortable as possible. >> and safe. absolutely. and thank you so much derek. very interesting the weather going on. we also know this pilot had 6,100 years of flying but we dont know how many hours as captain of the airbus 320. we dont know if it was a female pilot or a male pilot, dont know anything ab...

Noted over. >> something not being handled. it brings to mind the france crash. again, not speculating if thats what happened but would bring more comfort if perhaps there were some crew error involved rather than something to do with the aircraft itself. the a-320, an excellent operating record over the years. >> an airline has 200 of these. you are talking about an airline almost say, the size of oh jetblue in the u.s. and that kind of airline that a lot of leisure travellers including u.s. oh...

Was -- im guessing in that time when we get the final transcripts what it will show almost certainly is that the air traffic control had had control of the aircraft, would have been calling to the previous one to see if theyd seen it. it would have been calling to other aircraft in the region, have you heard. they would have been calling back to airasias network operations center. so its not necessarily for 30 minutes people were twiddling their thumbs. if you look at >> people were making calls...

Individuals were on the air bus 320. the kind of air craft you see on your screens right here. 155 passengers and seven crew. most are indonesians are three south koreans. one singaporeans. one malaysian and one french person onboard. we have also learned that 16 children and one infant are among the passengers. >> well the ceo of air asia tweeted this short statement. thank you for all of the your thoughts and prayers. we must stay strong. weve also received a statement from the singaporean pri...

Did hit the water. so what they would do is do a route search from where the plane took off to short of its destination. they do have imperical data of where the aircrafts flight path was. so they will glide and fall. we will concentrate that search. thats what you will do initially. then you will get ships and helicopters. they are not so far off the coast, not clearly as far as the malaysia aircraft was off the coast of australia. >> all right. so colonel, we know that this was a budget carrie...

So theres a lot of information, and many times its not just the words of the pilot and the co-pilot or the radio reception, but its the noises, the sounds, the ambient pieces of information that leave clues, give clues. >> les, let me ask you about human versus machine. these planes are so advanced that they can really fly themselves once theyre up at altitude. so when does the pilot make the decision to override an au autopilot, for example, to take control themselves and is there any push and ...

Planes off the ground even in bad weather? >> well, i dont think you can draw there is a pressure to fly anytime it is unsafe. i have flown on airasia. they are a low-cost, but they are high-quality airline. historically, they have operated very safely. i dont know that we can draw any conclusions at this early stage about what happened, much less any pressure in trying to draw a correlation to a low-cost operation. i dont think we have the evidence to do that yet. >> i dont think at this point ...