继续搜寻亚航客机失联

Hours of searching have failed to locate the AirAsia flight that went missing en route from Indonesia to Singapore with 162 people on board.

The air search was suspended as night fell and is to resume this morning.

Some ships continued to comb the area near Belitung island in the Java Sea overnight.

Mochamad Hernanto is a spokesperson for Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency.

"The rescue operation has not stopped. We suspended the search and rescue operation which starts in the morning and ends in the evening, so tomorrow we will continue to do it again."

AirAsia Group's CEO Tony Fernandes says that the focus right now should be on the search for the missing plane and its passengers.

"Our concern right now is for the relatives and for the next of kin, there is nothing more important to us for our crew's family, and for our passengers' families, that we look after them. That is our number one priority at the moment to make sure that we take care of them. And to fully cooperate with the investigation and we hope that the aircraft is found quickly and we can find out the cause of what has happened. For the moment we don't want to speculate. We do not know what's happened."

Meanwhile, more than 100 distraught relatives of passengers from the missing airbus hunkered down at a makeshift crisis center at the Surabaya airport, waiting anxiously for news.

"You know, it's a plane accident. I only ask God for a miracle. I hope not only my family will be saved but everyone on board."

Flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, disappeared over the Java Sea an hour into its flight from Surabaya in eastern Java to Singapore.

Bad weather was reported in the area but no distress call was made.

This has been an astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia.

The Malaysia-based carrier's loss comes on top of the still-unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July over Ukraine.