Missing Air Asia flight search on

12 vessels, dozens of inflatable boats, plus warships and military planes from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia are scouring the Java Sea, focused on Kumai Bay, for the Airbus Group NV A320 single-aisle jet that was en route to Singapore from the central Indonesian city of Surabaya when it went off radar screens.

The Indonesia search team suspects the plane is under water, national search and rescue agency chief F.H. Bambang Sulistyo said on Monday in Jakarta, with no signal from the emergency local transmitter detected.

A 10-hour hunt on Sunday found no sign of the plane that was carrying 155 passengers and seven crew. Poor visibility could hamper search and rescue efforts, Indonesia’s Vice President Jusuf Kalla told Bloomberg TV in a phone interview.

“We’re devastated, but we don’t know what’s happened yet,” said chief executive officer (CEO) Tony Fernandes, who bought Malaysia-based AirAsia for 1 ringgit (29 cents) in December 2001, at a press conference in Surabaya on Sunday. The airline is due to hold a press conference this morning.

Shares of AirAsia dropped as much as 13% in Kuala Lumpur trading, their biggest slide since 2011. While AirAsia is based in Sepang, Malaysia, it operates with subsidiaries and affiliates in different countries. The missing plane belonged to its Indonesian operations.

Flight 370

Though the incidents outwardly had little in common, other than they involved vanishing planes from airline companies based in the same country, the disappearance evoked fresh memories of the unresolved disappearance of Malaysian Airline System Bhd’s Flight 370.

Flight 370 vanished from radar screens en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur 8 March in what authorities called a deliberate act. No debris has been found in what’s become the world’s longest search for a missing passenger jet.

AirAsia QZ8501 was flying at 32,000 feet when the pilots requested to go higher to avoid clouds, Indonesia’s acting Air Transport director Djoko Murjatmodjo said in Jakarta.

There were storms along AirAsia’s flight path, Accuweather.com said on its website, citing its meteorologist Dave Samuhel. Storms are very active this time of year, Samuhel was quoted as saying, with December and January the wettest period of the year in Indonesia.

‘Golden hour’

The last signal from the plane was between the city of Pontianak on Borneo and the town of Tanjung Pandan on Belitung island. The search was initially concentrated around Belitung, Transport minister Ignasius Jonan said earlier. Sulistyo said the search area had been widened to include the Karimata strait and land areas in western West Kalimantan.

Robert Mann, head of aviation consultant R.W. Mann and Co. in Port Washington, New York, said searchers missed crucial daylight hours because authorities in Indonesia took an hour and 38 minutes to classify the plane as missing.

“It’s the golden hour in an accident scene; you only have so many daylight hours,” he said in a phone interview.

Australia deployed a P-3 Orion, a surveillance plane made by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. that can pick up emergency signals from a downed plane’s data recorders. Singapore and Malaysia were aiding in the search and Airbus, the sole jet supplier to AirAsia, sent two experts to Jakarta.

Last signal

There were no immediate reports of any distress signal. The Airbus A320-200 jet was not equipped with a system known as ACARS, which lets a plane automatically relay radio messages about engine performance to manufacturers, according to Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for General Electric Co., which is part of a joint venture that manufactured the jet’s powerplants.