AirAsia Flight 8501: What we know

AirAsia Flight 8501 disappeared from radar screens Sunday with 162 people aboard. Here is what we know:

• The Airbus A320 flew out of Surabaya, Indonesia, at around 5:35 a.m. local time on Sunday (5:35 p.m. ET Saturday), bound for Singapore.

• Less than 40 minutes later, the pilot radioed air traffic control asking to increase the plane's altitude due to the weather. Heavy storms were reported in the area.

• Minutes later and about an hour before the plane was scheduled to land in Singapore, the plane lost contact with controllers and disappeared from radar.

•AccuWeather meteorologist Tyler Roys tells USA TODAY the area along the flight path was blasted by a string of severe thunderstorms when the jet disappeared.

• Two days of searching by 30 ships and 50 aircraft failed to locate the plane or any debris. The second day's effort on Monday was called off because of darkness. The search was scheduled to resume at dawn on Tuesday and will be extended to include land, according to Indonesian authorities.

• Some air crews spotted oily spots and objects in the sea Monday, but Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency ruled them out as connected with AirAsia, according to Trikora Harjo, general manager of Juanda Airport.

• There were seven crew members and 155 passengers on board — with 138 adults, 16 children and one infant, the airline said in a statement. The passengers and crew included three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a French co-pilot, a British national and his 2-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.

• This is the third major air incident for Southeast Asia this year. On March 8, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people aboard. It remains missing. And on July 17, another Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over eastern Ukraine while on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The 298 people on board were killed.