‘Papa, come back’, missing AirAsia pilot’s daughter post message on social media
The daughter of Captain Irianto, the pilot of missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 has posted a poignant message on social networking site Path to her father, Indonesian news website kompas.com reported.
Identified only as Angela, she uploaded a picture of her father and wrote: "Papa pulang. Kakak masih butuh papa. Kembalikan papaku. Papa pulang pa, papa harus ketemu." (Papa come back. I still need you. Return my papa to me. Papa come back, we have to meet.)"
Angela is one of Irianto's two school-going children. His wife is not working.
According to a media release by AirAsia, Irianto had clocked 6,100 hours of flying time. With him was first officer Remi Emmanual Plesel, who had logged 2,275 hours. Plesel is a French national.
The other crew members onboard the missing flight are flight attendants Wanti Setiawati, Oscar Desano, Khairunisa Haidar Fauzi and Wismoyo Ari Prambudi, as well as Saiful Rakhmad, who is the plane’s engineer.
Flight QZ8501 went missing while flying from Surabaya to Singapore on Sunday. It left the Juanda International Airport at 5.20am Indonesian time and was due to land at the Changi International Airport at 8.30am Singapore time.
It is now believed that the flight got into trouble after it experienced bad turbulence and went down near Belitung. Indonesian authorities has dispatched a search and rescue unit to the location where the Airbus A320 is believed to have crashed.
The flight was carrying 155 passengers on board, including 16 children and one infant.
The passengers comprise 149 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Singaporean, one Malaysian and one Briton. – December 29, 2014.
