PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia—It was rainy that Sunday morning. The sky was thick with cloud cover and visibility was quite low. Rahmat (his only name), a 44-year-old fisherman from the village of Kampung Kubu in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia went out to sea as usual.
He never thought that what he would see at that day would end up being one of the key pieces of information that eventually lead to the discovery of AirAsia’s missing Flight 8501.
Based on his hint, the rescue teams focused the search on the area where the flight was ultimately found, on the third day of searching.
The Airbus A320-200 disappeared from radar screens roughly 40 minutes into a routine flight from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore on December 28. It took two days of intensive search efforts from sea and sky to finally locate the wreckage and begin the work of unraveling why the plane went down killing all 162 on board.
