MISSING AIRLINER – AT 11:14 A.M. ET:  We reported last night that a Malaysian airliner was missing.  It is still missing.  From CNN:

(CNN) -- An AirAsia passenger jet carrying 162 people lost contact with Indonesian air traffic control early Sunday, gripping Southeast Asia with a second missing plane crisis in less than a year.

The search operation for the missing AirAsia Flight QZ8501 has been halted for the night, but big ships won't return to shore and will leave their searchlights on, according to the Indonesian Transportation Ministry.

Before communication was lost, one of the pilots asked to fly at a higher altitude because of bad weather, officials said.

The aircraft, flying from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore, went missing as it flew at 38,000 feet over the Java Sea between the islands of Belitung and Borneo -- a heavily traveled shipping channel with shallow waters, according to Indonesian authorities, who are leading the search and rescue operations. 

COMMENT:  Strange.   No ship apparently heard or saw the plane go down.  Also, there has been nothing heard from the "pingers" that send distress signals from an airliner's black boxes.  There were apparently no cell phone calls. 

News reports are assuming that the call from the cockpit was legit.  I have no evidence to the contrary, but the plane was a modern Airbus with weather-detecting radar capacities.  Experts on the air are skeptical that it could have run directly into weather bad enough to destroy it. 

You'll recall the Malaysian Airliner, Flight 370, that disappeared last March, and has never been found.  Once searching resumes, so the "expert" speculation goes, wreckage from the AirAsia airliner will be found in the Java Sea.  We'll follow the search.

There had been reports in recent weeks that American intelligence agencies expected a terror attack on ana airliner to coincide with the Christmas season.  But the assumption was that the airliner would be American. 

December 28, 2014