It has been two days and still no sign of the AirAsia jetliner that disappeared over the Java Sea.There's been no confirmation of why the plane went down either.The Airbus A320 had 155 passengers and 7 crew members onboard and was on route from Indonesia to Singapore.Joining us now is John Cox, an aviation safety consult, accident investigator and a former commercial pilot.He's monitoring the AirAsia story from Tampa, Florida.There's a lot we don't know about the disappearance of this plane. What do we know at this point?We know that the airplane was operating in areas where there were large groups of thunderstorms.We know that they requested a deviation around the thunderstorms and they requested a change in altitude.Something occurred after those requests that required the attention of the crew.Air traffic control realized that the airplane was no longer on radar very quickly and notified the appropriate authorities.And right now, that's about all we know.As you just mentioned, they were trying to avoid a storm cloud when they lost communication with air traffic control.Is it too soon to speculate that bad weather was the reason for their disappearance?Professional pilots deal with thunderstorms on a very regular basis, and we go around them.We circumnavigate them. You don't fly through thunderstorms.So the fact that there were thunderstorms in the area does not mean that that is a causal factor.That's going to be one of the questions that the investigators are going to have to look at and answer.
