USS Sampson, a guided missile destroyer, will be joining some 30 ships and 21 aircraft from Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea in searching for the possible remains of an Indonesia AirAsia jet, which have gone missing since December 28.
China is also reportedly sending another warship to South China Sea to help in the search operations.
The Airbus A320-200, operated by Indonesia AirAsia lost radar contact on December 28 on poor weather conditions hours after taking off from Surabaya City in Indonesia bound for Singapore.
Flight QZ8501 was laden with 162 passengers broken down into 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Singaporean, one Malaysian, one British, and one French.
Just like in past cases of missing aircraft, investigators immediately looked into the possibility of foul play, whether hi-jacking in mid-air or terrorist assault, but nothing has turned up based on the passenger and crew lists.
In a report by Reuters, Indonesia, which is taking the lead in the search and rescue operations, has already expanded the search area to include the waters between the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, which means a total of 10,000 square nautical miles of coverage.
The depth of the sea in the designated search area is between 50 to 100 meters, which would hasten the efforts, on the assumption that the AirAsia jet did crash into the waters.
Initial search operations have been centered mostly on the Java Sea as well as the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo and nearby small islands but have turned out nothing so far.
Indonesian air force has also spotted an oil spill somewhere in the area on December 29 and is now zeroing in on the site.
Another mystery or an accident?
Up until this hour, the sudden disappearance of Flight QZ8501 remains a mystery, the same way that the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China laden with 239 passengers.
There is still no sign of wreckage or anything at all from that ill-fated MH370 flight, almost 10 months after it disappeared.
Minutes before it lost radar contact, Flight QZ8501 even sought permission from Indonesian air traffic control to fly above the brewing cloud formation ahead of it.
There were reports of a secondary radar data from Malaysia that the Indonesian AirAsia jet climbed up at a speed of 353 knots, which was 100 knots below the required speed to do so in poor weather conditions, and might have stalled.
All discussions after the possible stalling were just presumptions because the jet plane could either have exploded in mid-air or went-crashing down to sea. The mystery of it all is that there was no trace of any wreckage, which is normal for a plane crash.
While the jet disappearance is the first for Indonesian aviation this year, it comes off as the third incident involving a Malaysian-affiliated carrier in less than 10 months.
Malaysian budget carrier AirAsia Group owns 49% of the Indonesia Air Asia. It also has affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines, and India.
After the disappearance of Flight MH370 on March 8, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down on Ukraine on July 17, killing all of its 298 people on board.