Search has been halted until daylight. Unfortunately no new facts. But let me redo this statement from the airlines ceo. He says we will deeply shocked and saddened by this incident. Were cooperating with the authorities to the fullest extent to determine the cause of this incident. But meanwhile our main focus is keeping our families informed. Lets begin with cnns aviation correspondent Richard Quest, he joins me now, and i believe we have Andrew Stevens up. Hes at the airport and hes been there for a few hours now. Andrew how are officials and families dealing with whats happened . Reporter its a very very tough situation as you can imagine, brian, the families have been gathering here. We understand that they have been taken to a hotel nearby. They are airasia staff, obviously with them. Were also being told that ceo Tony Fernandez, he touched down earlier, about two or three hours ago, and is also expected to be seeing those family members as well. But at this stage there is as Tony Fernandez kept on saying during his press conference here we dont have any facts to operate on so were just sticking to what we know and absolutely no speculation at all. But its interesting, the Vice President , the number two person in indonesia, whos been quoted as saying it appears as if this flight suffered an accident. Thats all he said but obviously indonesian authorities are now fearing the worst. And for the families as Tony Fernandez was saying they are the priority getting information to them its frustratingly little information, an enormously tough time for everyone here. There was a report nine hours ago now of wreckage seen in the java sea, and p theres no evidence to back that up . Reporter absolutely not confirmed, and there has been no indication certainly, Tony Fernandez, not mentioning that at all at his press conference i have seen those reports and we have been asking here and we have been checking with indonesian authorities, they say they are not aware of them. But as you so rightly say, in the first few hours of any what looks like a catastrophe, there is a lot of information, indonesia, a lot of local media here reporting a lot of information. So were being very careful about what were saying serge nothing at this stage to back up those claims that wreckage has been sighted. You landed a few hours ago, what is the scene at the airport like. Arent you going to get they have put up a Crisis Center here set up beheaped me and theres really just a few journalists waiting here. Waiting to see if anymore information comes out. The families did gather here a lot of families are from surabaya about 150 indonesian families who were on that flight. And a lot of those people taking that flight at 5 30 in the morning, were going to singapore for a new years celebration. So as you can imagine, as the family members started to gather here, the shock, the sadness, the fears of what may be just rippling across this entire airport. When we flew in the airport is very much business as usual. Smiling people still waiting to welcome people off of planes. You come out of the main terminal building and you move along a little bit to where this Crisis Center is its a much different mood much more somber, we havent spoken to any of the family members yet, theyre being held in their hotel and not being made accessible to the media, locally or internationally for that matter brian, getting a couple of stories floating through the local media, the terrible stories of people waiting for their two children two other family members. But one story if confirmed sounds quite remarkable. A family of ten was supposed to be on that flight a family of ten in surabaya they missed it because of miss communication, they actually thought that flight was leaving two hours later. If that story is confirmed, thats a good piece of luck for that family. Sort of overwhelming list of passengers who at this stage, search it doesnt look good for what happened or what may have happened to those passengers. Business as usual in other parts of the airport. I imagine its closing in on midnight there, i assume its starting to trickle down there, its less busy now . Thats right, it is its thinning out around this press center too, the Crisis Center it is thinning out as well. But airasia has been very active in getting information out, brian, so people are still waiting here waiting to get perhaps more information. But as we have been reporting, the actual Aerial Search has been called off. We understand there are ships in the vicinity where they think the plane may have gone down based on the final messages from the pilot and the flight path they have spotlights the conditions in that area are supposed to be pretty tough. I asked Tony Fernandez at that press conference was he aware that the weather could have been in any way responsible and he said that conditions were not good heavy clouds there, but he couldnt speculate beyond that. But certainly things are getting quiet here were told there will be a press conference here early tomorrow morning, where were hoping a little bit more information could come out. Andrew stephens at the airport, thank you for being here. And well talk more about the weather conditions in just a moment. I want to share a heart wrenching piece of audio, one of the family members that andrew was just describing was speaking earlier in front of microphones and here it is. My fiance and his family was on that plane. And in the morning, we lost contact, but i didnt think of anything i didnt have any feeling at all. And when i was on my way to the airport, i listened to the radio, local radio and they said that his plane was missing. Thats all yeah it was supposed to be their last vacation before us got married. Which was to be his last vacation with his family. As andrew was saying some people there traveling to singapore for the new year holiday, lets go to Richard Quest, he is cnns aviation correspondent, joining us via skype, what can you tell us about the pilot, about his amount of experience flying this aircraft and about the Safety Record of the aircraft . Reporter the pilot had six hours of flying experience the other pilot had 2,000 hours. Certainly not inexperienced, quite often youll see captains in the left hand seat going to 12,000 the, 14,000 15,000 hours of experience. So i would say you had a bhod rat moderately experienced crew but not terribly experienceded. The a320, if you take the family of aircraft, that goes from 320, to 18, 19, 20 and 21. Theres about 6,000 of them that have been delivered. It has an exceptionally good record it is the workhorse of the low cost carrier fleet across the world. And i think in terms of the 320 itself just a couple of dozen fatal accidents. Also brian, note all the major u. S. Carriers, united delta and american they also have 320s, 321s, 319s in their fleet. It has an excellent Safety Record. This plane and this airline, airasia, isnt it part of a story of modernization and globalization in this part of the world. Southwest of the United StatesTony Fernandez and airasia, did in Southeast Asia and he did it starting in kuala lumpur and in asia to get over protection and National Laws he has expanded that and he has had to do it through for example, theres a tie of hes looking at one in india, one in japan, and of course there is indonesia airasia. So this airline, yes, it is indonesian by registration by ownership, but fernandez in asia owns about 48 , 49 of it, and de facto they run this airline, its a hybrid if you like but the most part of this vast group of aviation has taken place. Airasia itself has a pretty much perfect Safety Record. There is not a blemish against airasia. You would be wrong to link this to flight 370 that went missing 10 months ago. But as of this moment the search for this aircraft is exactly the same as 370. How so . Because the plane is missing, it went down over water, you have to have assets heading in that general direction and they have to do the lowe overwater flights, so youve got to get ships there. So you start with the last known place of the aircraft when it went missing. Now in the case of Malaysia Airlines it was between malaysia and vietnam, well remember that forever. In case of this its over the java sea, its we know roughly where it should be. Its a question of getting those planes and ships i heard in an earlier program, i heard peter talking about the java sea, the south indian ocean is thousands of feet deep, the java sea is 200 feet deep. If this plane did come down at 38,000 feet there will be a large debris field where its pretty clear that that happened and relatively easy to find that which remains. Did 370 change the way we talk about these incidents . We now talk about planes vanishing going missing, where in the past didnt we talk about them presuming to them to have crashed . 370 was put on to the table the very concept that you wont know whats happened and you wont know wrote the plane is. And brian, you raise a very good point, because besides amelia arehart, its almost unthinkable that you wouldnt know where the plane is a modern airline. 370 put that into the domain. So now it is a legitimate question who say will we find it . People who cover these cases, vanishing is unique. This is different, since were talking on reliable sources, what we do have that we never had before brian, is access to things like flight radar 24 and flight aware, we have a lot more information coming to us online these chatrooms for pilots. For instance for instance we know for example what flight the what altitude that the plane was heading for, we know it was radar tracked, we know it might have been go too slow these are facts now coming into the domain that we wouldnt have known in the past. A lot more to talk about and record report on in this hour were going to talk about the weather in the region then and now, also the governments response we have a panel of experts standing by, so stay with us, well be right back. The Holiday Season is here, which means its time for the volkswagen signthendrive event. For practically just your signature, you could drive home for the holidays in a germanengineered volkswagen. Like the sporty, advanced new jetta. And the 2015 motor trend car of the year allnew golf. If youre wishing for a new volkswagen this season. Just about all you need is a finely tuned. Pen. Hurry in to the sign then drive event and get a fivehundred dollar new years bonus on select new volkswagen models. Offer ends january 2nd. Its more than the driver. Its more than the car. For lotus f1 team, the Competitive Edge is the cloud. Powered by microsoft dynamics, azure, and office 365, the team can gain Real Time Insights and instantly share information around the globe. When every millisecond counts, staying competitive begins with the cloud. This is the microsoft cloud. Welcome back. What were about to show you is the actual area the plane is said to have went missing. The flight was going to indonesia to singapore when it hit bad weather, the pilot then asked to increase altitude. Now the whole world is watching as this situation unfolds. Michaels obrien cnns science and space correspondent wrote that this flight beware the itcz it creates the worst thunderstorms on earth, no flying over them. Hes referring to the area near the equator, the intertropical convergence zone the weather can be erratic and very dangerous. Lets take a closer look at the weather in the region. With Karen Maginess in the cnn weather center. Many planes fly this stretch of sea every day, something went wrong in this particular flight obviously. But what were the conditions at the time this flight went missing from radar . It was very treacherous. We have seen an enhanced monsoon season meaning we normally see this escalated precipitation event that takes place over the course of months and this is the monsoon season there. But over the last couple of weeks, this has been upped a little bit we have seen staggering rainfall totals in asian and indonesia. This is surabaya and singapore, this would be like if youre traveling from new york city to atlanta, georgia, thats correct, thats just about the distance that this plane would fly, its a couple of hours in the air. You would think nothing of it except if youre the pilot, you see this these huge clusters of heavy precipitation, supercells that just kind of erupt, thats why more than likely the pilot asked for a diversion, and once it did, then we lost track of the airplane. No doubt it is in the java sea and thats where theyre going to begin their search. Brian, when the Aerial Search resumes in a little over seven hours, what will conditions be like then. During the Early Morning hours, we typically see those thunderstorms, theyll popup here and there, but they like the heat of the day, we start to see that warm moist air start to build and we see these huge clusters of thunderstorms. Heres the south china sea, it dies down a little bit and then it flares up. Thats the kind of thing that were going to see. One other thing that we look at is the water temperature here if it is indeed a search and rescue rescue the water temperature is here running between 80 and 85 degrees. One possible bit of good news there. Let me ask two aviation experts about this stet of facts that we have. A former farks aa Safety Management expert and former managing director of the ntsb. Tell me peter, when we hear about this report that the pilot requested to guyhigher why would he do that and is that a normal thing to do . Its a normal procedure that a pilot will take. Hes trying to figure out a way to get around the most serious storm clouds if he couldnt convert, i think hes going to make an attempt to fly over it. There isnt anything unusual about that at all. It happens on many flights every day. Why would there have been no distress signal in a situation like this . During this time theres a lot going on in the cockpit, hes responding to whatever has happened as far as the diversion goes thats normal theres no reason to call a distress signal. What concerns me most we have reports that the adsb continued to transmit continued to reach out and send information during that time. If it was only a few minutes, i could see why the pilots wouldnt have had time to communicate. In this case if the aircraft continued to fly for almost 30 minutes, at that time you would have expected that if the pilots were able to communicate, they certainly would have made a distress call. Richard was talking in the last block about how we get so much data on these flights these days how reliable is that data the information we get about altitude and latitude and longitude . Its very reliable the problem is its not always current. Peter mentioned this before when he was with the ntsb he recommended this and its been recommended many times since then it needs to be streaming information, so when these incidents happen we know exactly where the aircraft wept and exactly where it went down. So we have a lot of information and as you said, brian, too, we have so much information but its seems like so little at the same time. What is the answer for why were not getting that streaming data yet . Well theres a couple of reasons. Go ahead, peter. As david was going to say, theres a couple of reasons, one is that the International CivilAviation Authority which operates out of Montreal Canada is painfully slow in adopting safety recommendations, theyre still debating Malaysia Flight 370 and it takes unanimous concept p to the to implement it it. So airlines have to be more aggressive in spending their own funds and tracking their own aircraft over transoceanic flights. Its basic. David, what is the one question you have in your mind that you most want the answers to other than the obvious here . The atsb thats the first thing i would key in on that false information, if thats true then something very serious went wrong in parallel with what went wrong in 370. So thats the first thing i would look at. And on more of a latentt thing. What are the views going to be asking themselves . Im suspecting that the asian air authorities are working through the night gathering up any technical data they can get their hands on filtering through any firsthand reports that theyre getting, so when daybreaks, theyre dispatching aircraft and vessels to the place where they think this aircraft went down. We cant waste time on this we need to get people out there in a likely area as soon as possible. David and peter, thank you for being here and please stay with us. 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