Bad luck is said to come in threes. For Malaysia’s aviation industry, that superstition looks perilously close to the truth.

Flight QZ8501, which disappeared in the early hours of Sunday morning on its way from Surabaya to Singapore, belonged to AirAsia Indonesia, a 49 per cent-owned affiliate of Malaysian budget carrier AirAsia. Along with flight MH370, the Malaysia Airlines plane that mysteriously disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March, and MH17, shot down over eastern Ukraine in July, its disappearance spells the end of a disastrous year for the sector.

Other than the Malaysian connection, however, there is nothing obvious to link the three incidents, according to aviation experts. One occurred because of an act of hostility over European airspace and another when the plane disappeared without trace after diverting radically from its intended flight path.