Indonesia called off until first light a search for an AirAsia plane with 162 people on board that went missing on Sunday after pilots asked to change course to avoid bad weather during a flight from Indonesia's Surabaya city to Singapore.

Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501, an Airbus 320-200 carrying 155 passengers and seven crew, lost contact with Jakarta air traffic control at 6:17 a.m. (2317 GMT on Saturday). No distress signal had been sent, said Joko Muryo Atmodjo, an Indonesian transport ministry official.

On board were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans and one each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain, plus a French pilot, the airline said in a statement, correcting earlier information.

Tatang Kurniadi, head of Indonesia's National Committee of Safety Transportation, expressed hope of locating the aircraft quickly and said it was too early to detect any of the so-called electronic pings from its black box recorder.

"We are using our capacity to search on sea and land. Hopefully we can find the location of the plane as soon as possible," he told a news conference.

"What I need to emphasize is until now, we have not found out how the plane fell or what kind of emergency it was."

Indonesia AirAsia is 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia (AIRA.KL), which has had a clean safety record since it began operating 13 years ago. The AirAsia group also has affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India. The aircraft had accumulated approximately 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights, according to Airbus (AIR.PA).

The pilots of QZ8501 "was requesting deviation due to en-route weather before communication with the aircraft was lost," the airline said in a statement. Singapore, Malaysia, Britain, South Korea and Australia offered to help in the search and any investigation. Malaysia said it was sending vessels and a C130 aircraft while Singapore had also sent a C130. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a P3 Orion aircraft was on standby if needed.

ANXIOUS RELATIVES

Flight QZ8501 was between Tanjung Pandan on Indonesia's Belitung island and Pontianak, in West Kalimantan province on Borneo - almost halfway between Surabaya and Singapore - when it went missing. There was bad weather over Belitung at the time and the aircraft had been flying at 32,000 feet before asking to fly at 38,000 feet to avoid clouds.

In both Surabaya and Singapore, anxious relatives of people on the plane awaited news.

Louise Sidharta was at Singapore's Changi Airport waiting for her fiancée to return from a family holiday.

"It was supposed to be their last vacation before we got married," she said.

A man named Purnomo told TVOne in Surabaya of a lucky escape.

"I should have been on the flight," he said. "We, seven people, had planned to go to Singapore for vacation but this morning I had an emergency. I had my passport in hand."

Tony Fernandes, chief of Malaysia's AirAsia, said he was heading to Surabaya.

"My only thoughts are with the passengers and my crew. We put our hope in the SAR (search and rescue) operation and thank the Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysian governments," he said on Twitter.

AirAsia swapped its distinctive bright red logo for a grey background on its website and social media accounts.

The incident comes during a troubled year for Malaysia-affiliated airlines. Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board and has not been found.

On July 17, Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

Indonesia AirAsia has a fleet of 30 Airbus A320s. The missing plane has been in service for just over six years, according to airfleets.net.

All AirAsia-branded airlines operate aircraft made by Airbus, which has orders for several hundred planes from the group. AirAsia is considered one of the European planemaker's most important customers.

As Mangalyaan successfully entered the Mars orbit on Wednesday, India not only became the first country to reach Mars on its maiden attempt, but also spent the least amount of money to do it.

Narendra Modi had earlier remarked that the mission is cheaper than Hollywood movie "Gravity", which cost $100 million to make.


At approximately Rs 450 crore or around $75 million, the cost of the mission was only about one-tenth of the $670 million Nasa spent on its Maven explorer.

European space agency's 2003 Mars express orbiter had cost about $386 million. Another exploration mission by Japanese, which failed to enter the Red Planet's orbit, had cost more than double than that of Mangalyaan. Russia's Phobos-Grunt which failed to leave the earth's orbit cost about $117 million.

India has been particularly proud that MOM was developed with homegrown technology.

Meanwhile, Isro's scientists are already planning new missions, including putting a rover on the Moon. But space agency chief K Radhakrishnan said their main focus would be to continue developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications.

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The glittering Hong Kong International Art Fair opens on Thursday, featuring works by artists from Picasso to Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei and cementing the city's status as a global art hub.
More than 260 galleries from 38 countries, representing an even split from the West and the East, have booked space at the four-day event known as Art HK, now in its fifth edition.
"The transformation here culturally has been pretty significant," art collector and fair board member Richard Chang told reporters ahead of the opening, referring to Hong Kong's emergence as a centre of the Asian art world.


"It's testament to what is happening in this region and it's very exciting."
A record 63,511 visitors attended Art HK last year, and organisers expect a bigger crowd in 2012. By comparison, the prestigious Frieze New York fair earlier this month attracted a reported 45,000 visitors.
A Wednesday night preview drew thousands of VIPs who had first pick of works including Ai's "Cong", a chilling installation about child deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a Sherrie Levine cast bronze called "Dada", and a fresh-off-the-easel 2012 portrait in oil of Lady Gaga by Yan Pei-Ming.
Director Magnus Renfrew said there had been a marked increase in interest from Western dealers compared to 2011.
"The art market tends to follow the money and the greatest source of wealth at the moment is in Asia," he said.
Traditionally known as a centre of banking and finance, Hong Kong has become a hub of all things luxury -- from fine wine to fashion and, increasingly, art -- thanks to the explosion of personal wealth among mainland Chinese.
Western gallery owners are now rushing to open franchises in the former British colony, despite some of the most expensive rents in the world.
Gagosian, White Cube, Acquavella, Simon Lee and Pearl Lam are just some of the recent arrivals. The government is weighing in as well, with a massive art and culture district being developed on the harbour in Kowloon.
"If you look at the calibre of some of the exhibitions this year, it's a top-tier fair now," London-based Australian gallery owner and Art HK exhibitor Simon Lee told AFP.
He said his "boutique-type offering" at the fair was more about making contacts and introducing his gallery to the Asian market than selling art to collectors.


"I can't hope to just come over here, plonk a few things on a booth and think it's all going to happen. It's sort of condescending to think it will all happen without doing the ground work," he said.
Asia's art boom has also caught the eye of the world's biggest art fair franchise, Art Basel, which bought a controlling stake in Art HK a year ago. The Hong Kong fair's 2013 edition will be held under the Art Basel banner.
Meanwhile a new art fair devoted to "affordable" contemporary art will be held in Hong Kong next year, organisers said Wednesday, confirming the city's new status as a hot ticket on the art scene.
The fair is being put together by Affordable Art China, a company which has organised a similar event in Beijing since 2006 and is opening a new franchise in Shanghai later this year.
Chief executive Tom Pattinson said the new fair offered a chance for smaller galleries and emerging artists to showcase their work in the booming art market of Hong Kong, now third only to New York and London in terms of art auctions.
"The success of the events in mainland China has demonstrated the demand for accessible contemporary fine art in the region and Hong Kong is now a major focus for us as we launch our first event in this territory," he said.
He said the value of the "affordable art" market -- pieces priced at less than $5,000 -- in China was estimated at $1.1 billion a year, and was doubling annually.
Renfrew said the new fair was not a threat to Art HK, which is held at the city's vast harbourside convention centre, as the two events catered to "very different audiences".
He urged Western artists and dealers to take a long-term view of the Asian art market.
"There are now more billionaires in Asia than there are in Europe, so it's a very exciting time for the art market here," he told AFP.
"It takes time to build an audience in Asia but the galleries are increasingly seeing that they have to diversify their audience and put in that investment and time."
Art fairs and auctions around the world have seen giddy bidding despite, or perhaps because of, the turmoil in the eurozone and on the world's stock markets, as investors look for other places to park their money.
At Sotheby's impressionist and modern sale in New York earlier this month, the only privately owned version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" went for $119.9 million, the most ever paid for any art work at public auction.

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Snapshoot Fancam I taken at 2012.05.12 Kim Hyun Joong Fan Meeting - Hong Kong. (Part 1)

Rajnikanth left for Hong Kong early this morning from Bangalore. Soundarya Ashwin, the director of the film was there earlier in March to study all she could about Motion Capture Technology which is to be employed for Kochadaiyan.
Hence the team will be heading there for the next leg of the shoot.

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