QZ8501 The pilot of the missing AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501 was a top student in his flying school, a friend said today.

Indonesian news portal Detik.com quoted a friend, Yadi, as saying that Captain Iriyanto was one of TNI AU-Indonesian Air Force flying school’s top students.

“He studied at the TNI AU-Indonesian Air Force flying school and graduated in 1983,” said Yadi, who himself graduated in 1987.

“He was the best in our flying school, he was also a great flyer of fighter jets,” Yadi said, explaining that a great flyer was one without problems and able to bring his juniors to become great flyers as well.

AirAsia had said that Iriyanto had logged a total of 20,537 flying hours to date. Of the total number of hours, the captain had 6,100 flying hours with AirAsia Indonesia on the Airbus A320.

Iriyanto was also an active user of Facebook, and he regularly updated on his daily activities, especially when eating at restaurants. His photographs also show him pictured with various big motorcycles.

Flight attendant’s tweets on MH17

Meanwhile, flight attendant Oscar Desano’s tweets on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was downed on July 17, have been widely reported by international media outlets such as Daily Mail and Mirror .

Oscar’s wife, Dessy, who is six months pregnant is always mentioned by Oscar in his tweets.

Dessy, who is a radio broadcaster and local presenter, had expressed hope for her husband’s return.

Stewardess Khairunisa Haidar Fauzi, on the other hand, had managed to contact her mother before leaving for Singapore and expressed her hope to celebrate the New Year at home in Palembang.

Khairunisa’s mother, Rohana, said her 22-year-old daughter had worked for nearly two years as a stewardess with AirAsia.

The flight attendant was the youngest of three siblings and was a student at the law faculty of Sriwijaya University.

The Koreans on board were missionaries who had made visits to a number of churches in Kota Malang for the past few months.

Only one Malaysian on board

The three were Lee Kwung Hwa, Park Seong Beom and a baby, Park Yuna. Park Yuna was the only infant on the flight.

Meanwhile, the only Malaysian on board was Jakarta-based businessman Sii Chung Huei. Sii, the husband of Annie Wong Muk Ngiik, an associate professor at Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) in Kuching.

The only Singaporean on board the missing flight was a two-year-old girl. Singaporean news site Channel News Asia reported that the two year-old girl was travelling with her father, a British national.

Her mother, who is Singaporean, had travelled back to Singapore earlier from Surabaya, with the child’s older sibling.

AirAsia's Surabaya-Singapore flight carrying 155 passengers and seven crew members on board went missing yesterday.

The Airbus 320-200 took off from Surabaya in Java, Indonesia, at 5.20am local time (6.20am Malaysian time) and was due to arrive in Singapore two hours later, but it lost contact with air traffic control.

Flight QZ8501 did not issue a distress signal and disappeared five minutes after requesting a change of course on Sunday, government and air transport officers said.