Day two of the search for missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 has unveiled a leading theory of its disappearance, but no comfort for those waiting for loved ones who, it now seems, will never arrive.

The renewed search, joined by an Australian marine surveillance plane, found no wreckage and no distress signal, dashing hopes of finding the 162 passengers alive.

Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency admitted on Monday that it suspects that the AirAsia flight crashed into the Java Sea and has come to rest “at the bottom”.

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• AirAsia flight QZ8501’s mysterious disappearance

On Tuesday, one of the passengers was identified as Melbourne student Kevin Alexander Soetjipto.

Mr Soetjipto was studying commerce at Monash University and it is believed he was flying with his sister and another relative.

A spokesperson said in a statement that the university community was “deeply saddened” by the news.

The names of the others on board are known. Slowly, we learn their faces.

Passengers and crew

Captain Iriyanto. Photo: Imgur

Behind the controls was Captain Iriyanto, a veteran of 6,100 flying hours, praised by his nephew as “a very caring person”.

“Come home, Papa, come home,” pleads his daughter Angela Ranastianis, who has posted the message along with photos of her father on social media.

Seated beside the captain was his decorated first officer Remi Emmanuel Plesel, a Frenchman, who had logged 2,275 hours of flight time.

The other crew members were flight attendants Oscar Desano, Wanti Setiwati, Khairunisa Haidar Fauzi and Wismoyo Ari Prambudi, as well as the plane’s engineer Saiful Rakhmad.

Khairunisa Fauzi. Photo: Instagram

Mr Desano boasts of his job on social media, posting dozens of photos with AirAsia colleagues and airports with captions like “my life my adventure”.

In 2011, he posts a photo in his flight attendant uniform with the caption “the new me”.

In March, he urges his friends to pray for the safe return of those aboard Malaysia Airlines. Now, prayers are offered for him.

“Come home quickly,” a friend writes to him online in Indonesian when she hears his flight is missing. “Hopefully everything is in God’s protection always, amen.”

Oscar Desano. Photo: Twitter

Flight attendant Khairunisa Fauzi studies law in between her global travel, she says on Twitter.

On Instagram, she shares proud photos of herself in the AirAsia uniform, as well as many travel pictures.

British businessman Chi Man Choi and his two-year-old daughter Zoe have also been named as passengers.

The rest of their family were booked on another flight, the BBC reports.

On LinkedIn, Mr Choi lists his current role as a unit managing director for Alstom Power in Indonesia. He is originally from Yorkshire.

In total, there were 149 Indonesians, three Koreans, one Singaporean, one Briton, and one Malaysian on board the passenger jet, according to the airline.

How could this have happened?

AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes says the missing plane was in “good condition”. Photo: AAP

Experts believe a one-in-a-million accident in the midst of a giant thundercloud may have caused AirAsia flight QZ8501 to disappear above the Java Sea.

The Airbus A320 lost contact with air traffic control at 11:24 am on Sunday approximately an hour from Indonesia on its way to Singapore. Before communication with the aircraft was lost, its pilots asked for permission to modify their route due to bad weather.

AirAsia’s flamboyant boss Tony Fernandes, a former record industry executive who acquired the then-failing airline in 2001, has acknowledged that weather conditions were “not good”, but has refused to speculate on what might have happened to the aeroplane.

Indonesia’s main newspaper Kompas reports, based on interviews with transport ministry officials, that a request to fly to the left was granted, but permission to climb 6,000 feet to an altitude of 38,000 was denied because of other flights overhead.

It is common for pilots to deviate from their routes to avoid tropical storms, which occur frequently at this time of year over the Java Sea, a flight safety expert tells The New Daily.

During these storms, thunderclouds can tower into the sky higher than an aircraft can fly, says CQ University’s Associate Professor Matthew Thomas.

Pilots would normally divert around these clouds, but not fly higher, he says.

“Pilots will simply request a diversion of whatever number of miles, 10 or 20 miles in some instances, left or right of their track, just to make sure they don’t get caught up right in the middle of those quite violent cells.”

Too slow?

An Indonesian official examines a flight path map. Photo: AAP

Geoffrey Thomas, aviation expert and editor of airlineratings.com, spoke to several check captains and believes the plane did gain altitude and then stalled because it was not flying upwards fast enough.

“Pilots believe that the crew, in trying to avoid the thunderstorm by climbing, somehow have found themselves flying too slow and thus induced an aerodynamic stall,” Mr Thomas says.

A leaked radar plot from Indonesian air traffic control that Mr Thomas claims to have seen reportedly shows the jet climbing at 36,000 feet at a speed of 353 knots, which he says is approximately 100 knots too slow for the altitude and “exceedingly dangerous”.

Mr Thomas speculates that the slow climb may been out of the pilot’s control.

“He got caught in a massive updraft or something like that. Something’s gone terribly wrong,” he says.

High altitude risks

AirAsia crew work on an Airbus 320 the day of the missing flight. Photo: AAP

Gaining altitude is not normal practice because of a phenomenon called “coffin corner”, which increases the risk of stalling.

“As you go higher, there’s a narrower range between the maximum speed and the minimum speed the aircraft can fly,” Prof Matthew Thomas says.

“It is known that aircraft can get in trouble when they get into that narrow band of aircraft performance.”

Engine failure, known as a ‘flame out’, can also be caused in tropical storms by hail and heavy rain. A lightning strike is another risk. But all of these possibilities are “very rare”, Assoc Prof Thomas says.

In years past, lightning has disrupted electrical instruments, exploded fuel tanks and, when combined with wind turbulence, caused jets to crash. But modern safety standards rigorously protect against these calamities.

Prof Thomas says the chance of an aeroplane crash is approximately one in a million. In fact it’s closer to one in 1.6 million, according to 2010 data.

“These aircraft are built to withstand extreme conditions and it is a very rare and unexpected event to lose an aircraft in this instance, so weather may well not be the cause,” Prof Thomas says.

“It might be something quite different. We just don’t know.”

Off the radar

A relative cries as family and friends wait for news on the missing flight. Photo: AAP

Geoffrey Thomas suggests that an older radar system may explain why the pilots were forced to climb.

Captain Iriyanto could have been deceived by poor equipment.

The radar used by the A320, while sophisticated, is not the latest technology and can sometimes have problems in thunderstorms, Mr Thomas says.

The latest technology radars, which were pioneered by Qantas in 2002, can give a more complete and accurate reading of a thunderstorm, but have not been certified for the A320 until next year.

“If you don’t have what’s called a multi-skilled radar you have to tilt the radar yourself manually, you have to look down to the base of the thunderstorm to see what the intensity of the moisture and the rain is, then you make a judgment of how bad it is. It’s manual, so it’s possible to make a mistake, it has happened,” Mr Thomas says.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has pledged all “humanly possible” support for the search, but says the disappearance is neither a mystery nor an atrocity.

“This is not a mystery like the MH370 disappearance and it’s not an atrocity like the MH17 shooting down,” Mr Abbott told Macquarie Radio on Monday, referring to the two Malaysia Airlines planes that crashed earlier in the year.

“It’s an aircraft that was flying a regular route on a regular schedule, it struck what appears to have been horrific weather and it’s downed.”

Nevertheless, aviation experts would be “putting their heads together to come up with the most effective way of ensuring that we don’t just lose planes”, the prime minister said.

– with Ebony Bowden, AAP