Terrence McCoy – For so many years, it came easy to Tony Fernandes, a man who now finds himself at the center of Southeast Asia's latest aviation saga.
The chief executive of Air Asia, which on Sunday lost contact with a commercial jet carrying 162 people, took a company he bought for 35 cents, taking on its $13 million debt, and turned it into an aviation juggernaut. It helped bring budget travel to Southeast Asia. And then it went after the regional jewel: Indonesia.
In the past decade, Indonesia's middle class ballooned from 80 million to 130 million, a fast-growing demographic speckled throughout the nation's 17,500 islands, where flying is nearly always the best travel option. "Indonesia is like a planet," Fernandes, who opened an Indonesian affiliate and, in 2012, bought a local budget airline for $80 million, told the New York Times. "There's lots of room to grow."
But for all of its economic potential, Indonesia's aviation industry remains one of the world's most hazardous. Numerous accidents and incidents marred the industry's rapid ascent, and the European Union banned all but five of its 67 airlines from European airspace. The US State Department likewise expressed concern over Indonesia's aviation practices, and even Indonesia's civil aviation chief in 2007 called it a "never-ending struggle" to improve the country's culture and safety practices. The Federal Aviation Administration ranks it as a "category 2? country for deficient aviation safety, a rating shared by such nations as Ghana and Bangladesh.
"Indonesia has had a questionable safety record. This will once again raise questions about how safe Indonesian airlines are," Greg Waldron, Asia Managing Editor at Flightglobal, an industry data and news service, told Reuters. "This is the first incident for Indonesia AirAsia, but it will cast a spotlight once again on the entire industry."
There is no explanation yet for why an Air Asia Airbus A320-200 – which lifted off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya early Sunday for Singapore – went missing. But Indonesian officials now fear the worst. On Monday morning, the head of the Indonesian search agency said his "preliminary suspicion" was that the plane is now "at the bottom of the sea." He conceded Indonesia doesn't have the right technology to search the ocean's floor. "The capability of our equipment is not optimum," Indonesian official Bambang Soelistyo said, the New York Times reported.
If those suspicions are accurate, ensuing investigations may focus on the confusing last moments before Indonesian air-traffic controllers lost contact with the plane. As the airbus navigated the Java Sea, it encountered a string of violent thunderstorms and big clouds. So the pilot dispatched a request to ascend 6,000 feet and bypass a cloud. But Indonesian air-traffic controllers denied that request – and, minutes later, the plane disappeared without a distress call, The Washington Post's William Wan and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux reported.
Whether or not that decision contributed to the plane's demise, it is just the latest catastrophe to rock an aviation industry some say got too big too fast.