AirAsia caused a furor in April when its inflight magazine boasted that because of its pilots' continuous and very thorough training, the air carrier's planes are never lost. Although the company said the article was printed before Malaysia Airlines MH370 went missing on March 8, AirAsia nevertheless apologized for the gaffe.

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However, with the disappearance of QF8501 on Sunday, it seems excluded from the training of AirAsia aviators is to avoid travelling to the area known among aviation experts as the "thunderstorm factory."

The said area was the very zone where the missing aircraft ascended to avoid bad weather and the reason now why relatives of the 162 people aboard the ill-fated jet bound for Singapore are agonizing, waiting for news at Surabaya Airport.

That area over the Java Sea is notorious for its catastrophic storms, Strategic Aviation Solutions Chairman Neil Hansford told the Today show. He disclosed that most pilots went around the area, and the one who probably made the flight plan was unaware of the thunderstorm factory's notoriety.

Hansford explained that human factors played a role in the disappearance of the AirAsia plane.

"I've said all along it was never going to be engineering," Hansford added.

The search, now on its third day, has been expanded to include the western portion of West Kalimantan province, said Bambang Soelistyo, chief of Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency. He opined on Tuesday that the aircraft crashed and is probably at the bottom of the ocean.

Hansford said it was impossible for the jet to crash on land without people being aware of such an incident. He pointed out that because planes carry a large volume of aviation fuel on board, if it crashed on land, there should have been a massive explosion which "would have shaken the local out of the trees."

However, Tatan Kurniadi, chief of the Indonesian Transport Safety Committee, thinks otherwise. He explained that since the locator transmitter from QF8501 remains silent, it is an indicator that its signal was blocked or the plane went down on land.

Surabaya Airport, where a center was set up for relatives of the passengers and crew, was like a repeat of the scenes at Kuala Lumpur and Beijing in March where anger was growing among the relatives due to lack of information about their loved ones.

TagsAirAsia, Flight 8501, thuderstorm factory, missing plane, missing jet