This beautiful, 20-year-old Sumatran-born trainee flight attendant was just one member of a massive and growing industry that delivers the comforts of the lounge room to millions of travellers who now jet unworriedly around the globe.

But outside the windows of AirAsia's flight QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore early last Sunday morning, some of the most awesome physical forces on earth were brewing in the tropical sky. And, if the latest surmises are correct, despite every engineering marvel and innovation of modern aviation, these forces were conspiring to hurl the Airbus A320 violently to the sea 36,000 feet below.

Khairanisa's body, identifiable from the red-and-black uniform she was wearing and which still bore her name tag, seems to be one of the first to have been pulled from the ocean near where the plane carrying her and 161 others fell that morning.  She has now been formally identified, Fairfax Media has confirmed. Her family will fly her body to Palembang, South Sumatra, for burial.

Her father, Haidar Fauzi, has been preternaturally calm about the tragedy that befell his daughter. "We knew the risk our daughter was taking with this job," he says, "so we're prepared."

The risk of flying identified by this bereaved Indonesian villager is something the airline industry is keen to downplay. The might of human ingenuity and technology has focused on reducing aviation's dangers to virtually nothing. But still, according to  industry consultant Gerry Soejatman, risks exist.

"As comfortable as we are, and as safe as the statistics are, flying is inherently risky," Soejatman says.

"We rely on the training and the safety systems that have been developed over the years; that's what makes it safe ... and it is safe. But if we are careless, we have to remind ourselves that it is dangerous to fly."

One key danger is the cumulonimbus clouds that develop in the tropics during the monsoon season which, with their huge uptake of water into the atmosphere, drive global weather patterns.

"They can be extremely powerful [and] can overcome the aeroplane; we've know that for years, so there's nothing new. If they hit a cumulonimbus cloud then they're screwed."

Peter Marosszeky, an aviation specialist fellow at the University of NSW, recalls flying a Boeing 747 jumbo many years ago that plunged more than 30,000 feet after hitting an air pocket.

"The smaller the aircraft, the more prone it is to suffer serious control conditions where the pilot can lose control of the aeroplane," he says.

Even so, on early evidence that Soejatman has seen of what happened to QZ8501, the violence of this storm was extreme. It seems to have tossed this 70-tonne, $US90 million marvel of engineering and polymer composites like a toy into the sea at a sense-defying 24,000 feet per minute.

"It didn't fall out of the sky like an aeroplane," Soejatman says. "It was like a piece of metal being thrown down. It's really hard to comprehend ... The way it goes down is bordering on the edge of logic".

That several other flights were in the area at the time and reached their destinations unscathed only deepens the puzzle.

Forensic examination

The crash of AirAsia flight QZ8501 on Sunday in the Java Sea capped off a horror year for airlines based in Malaysia. It began with the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on March 8 – a mystery that still has not been solved despite an Australian-led search of thousands of square kilometres of the southern ocean.

This was followed by the shooting down of another of its Boeing 777 aircrafts over war-torn eastern Ukraine in July with the loss of all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.

At least this week, the families of the victims of the AirAsia flight have a chance to find closure. Their plane has been found, though weather has made it hard to get to the wreckage. Nevertheless, much remains to be explained.

The immediate task for Indonesian investigators will be to retrieve the vital flight-data recorders from what remains on the sea floor of the Karimata Strait. The "black box" – which is actually brightly coloured for visibility – will play a key role.

The plane lies in relatively shallow water of about 50 metres, a far less onerous recovery task than the one confronting authorities searching deep water for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

The AirAsia A320's cockpit voice recorder will contain up to two hours of recordings, which will allow investigators to listen to QZ8501's 53-year-old Captain Iriyanto and first officer, Frenchman Remi Emmanuel Plesel.

But it is the flight data recorder that holds a larger wealth of information, with up to 72 hours of flight time information about the plane's engine settings, air speed, positions of flight control and altitude.

Investigators already have information from air-traffic control such as voice and radar recordings – particularly from the Mode S transponder system – as well as the weather on the day of the crash from meteorologists.

"The key will be to find those recorders, download them and then see what they tell you. They effectively guide the investigation," Australian Transport Safety Bureau spokesman Joe Hattley says.

"You don't know where you are going until you get good data."

Soejatman says forensic examination of the plane's fuselage, or the remnants of it, will also provide important clues as to the forces that were acting upon it.

Airbus' single-aisle A320s are designed to withstand forces 1.5 times what they would usually encounter in abnormal weather, giving them a significant protective buffer from changes in climate patterns. The plane manufacturer declined to comment on specifics about the AirAsia crash because an investigation is under way.

In the case of QZ8501, Marosszeky says the AirAsia captain seems to have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Iriyanto, a former Indonesian air-force fighter pilot, sought clearance to climb from 32,000 to 38,000 feet to avoid a storm cell, but did not respond to air-traffic controllers when they gave clearance for a climb to 34,000 a short-time later. The pilots never made a mayday call.

"It appears that he was picked up by an updraft or a clear-air turbulence, which caused the aeroplane to go vertical. That argument is born out by the fact that air-traffic control had noticed that his air speed had really died off," Marosszeky says. "If it did in fact go into stall, then the pilot would have had a lot of trouble getting out of it. You would have to be extremely experienced. But we really don't know precisely what caused it."

Marosszeky says that in most cases pilots can avoid flying into dangerous conditions.

"In this particular case, I am a little bit surprised that the aircraft took off and flew into these known conditions," he says.

Computer systems and the latest technologies on-board modern aircraft give pilots a "infinitely larger scope of information". The downside, Marosszeky says, is that aeroplanes have become so complex that pilots have to be astute and highly disciplined to cope with the technological marvels.

He points out that the challenges confronting the pilots of Qantas flight QF32 in November 2010 when their A380 suffered a mid-air engine explosion was a classic example of "how a complex machine can almost cause the aeroplane to crash and burn". Disaster was averted, and the plane was able to make an emergency landing at Singapore without physical injury to passengers or crew, because five experienced pilots were on board.

"If you had lesser pilots with lesser experience you would have a disaster on your hands," he says.

Safety record

The demands on air-safety investigators are enormous in the aftermath of a major crash. The clamour for answers has been exacerbated in the era of social media and 24-hour news, which produces a torrent of often unfounded, but firmly expressed, speculation about the causes of a crash.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation, a part of the United Nations, requires a preliminary report within 30 days of a major incident and a final report within a year. The task of delivering a report within 30 days is made even harder when the vital data recordings take some time to be recovered.

While Indonesian authorities have been praised for their speed and transparency in locating debris from the AirAsia plane, the crash has shone the spotlight on the populous south-east Asian nation's aviation safety record. The US Federal Aviation Administration lists Indonesia as one of nine countries which fail a safety assessment.

European authorities have also banned a long list of Indonesian airlines from flying to Europe due to safety concerns. While Indonesia AirAsia, an offshoot of AirAsia founder and chief executive Tony Fernandes' Kuala Lumpar-based company, was once banned, it has joined flag carrier Garuda and three others in gaining the right to fly to destinations in Europe.

Soejatman says that, though Indonesian aviation has had a patchy record, he is confident that it's improving. On a vast, mountainous archipelago, with appalling road infrastructure and a minimal port network, air travel is growing as fast as the burgeoning Indonesian middle class can afford to buy a ticket to destinations in both their own country and others.

Between them, privately owned Indonesian carrier Lion Air and AirAsia have ordered more than 800 aircraft – one of the fastest growths of an airline capacity at any time in history. Indonesia's air traffic has increased five-fold since 2004 and now they country's airports, particularly the chronically clogged Soekarno-Hatta in Jakarta, are reaching the limits of their capacity.

Even so, Soejatman says the country is slowly sorting out its problems. The number of accidents is falling each year and the rate per million passengers has seen "a massive reduction".

The challenge is to keep that going despite the ongoing growth in the number of planes in the air and the massive demand for a limited global pool of pilots, engineers and crew.

With the grim task of recovering the bodies of passengers and crew still under way, this crash presents AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes with one of the biggest tests of his career.

His $1 investment in an airline with just two planes in 2001 has grown to span Asia with a fleet of almost 170 aircraft. It has carried almost as many passengers as Indonesia has people.

Similar to Jetstar, AirAsia has adopted a strategy of expanding by setting up affiliate airlines such as Indonesia AirAsia in which the central company has a minority stake – but management control – to get around regulatory barriers.

But the quickest way for an airline to go bust is to suffer a fatal plane crash. Malaysia Airlines' loss of two Boeing 777 aircraft in 2014 effectively resulted in the need for the Malaysian government to bail it out.

So far Fernandes has played his hand well – he appeared at the scene of the tragedy and in front of bereaved families; he apologised, promised to pay virtually open-ended compensation and to fix any problems the investigation finds. But his troubles were compounded on Tuesday when an AirAsia plane overshot a runway at Kalibo in the Philippines, forcing passengers to use emergency slides.

"You have to be a very big airline to survive an accident," ATSB spokesman Stuart Godley says. "Any significant accident has bankrupted most airlines, and it is really only the big airlines that have survived."

In the short term Fernandes, who has had many fleeting talks with successive Qantas management teams over the years about alliances, has insisted that bookings on AirAsia flights remain strong. He has tweeted numerous pictures of happy customers, and expressions of support, since the crash.

Australia's largest travel company, Flight Centre, doubts the tragedy will curb consumers' appetite to travel.

Australia and International Pilots Association treasurer Adam Susz also points out that the A320 aeroplane – a workhorse for airlines such as Jetstar and Air New Zealand – is one of the most popular and reliable in the world. "We want to reassure people that flying is an incredibly safe activity and events like this [AirAsia crash] are incredibly rare," he says.

It's both true and reassuring, though it offers no consolation to the families of the 162 passengers and crew who were killed going about their business on the morning of December 28.

For some, perhaps, particularly in Muslim-majority Indonesia, consolation may only be sought where Khairunisa's father, Haidar finds it.

"We only borrowed our daughter from God," he says serenely. "And now he has taken her back."