Air Asia flight from Indonesia to Singapore vanishes

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In summary, an AirAsia flight from Indonesia to Singapore with over 100 people on board lost contact with air traffic control and is currently missing. The pilot's last communication was a request to change altitude due to bad weather, which was denied. Search and rescue operations are underway. Some experts speculate that the flight may have encountered severe weather, similar to the Air France Flight 447 incident in 2009. However, it is uncertain if the recalled pitot tube device, which was a factor in the Air France crash, was present on this plane. 2014 is considered the worst year for aviation in terms of total deaths, but the number of crashes is the lowest in 86 years. The cause of the crash is currently unknown and
  • #1
StevieTNZ
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http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/64507189/air-asia-flight-from-indonesia-to-singapore-vanishes

Search and rescue operations are underway after an AirAsia flight from Indonesian to Singapore with more than a hundred people on board lost contact with air traffic control.

Indonesian transport officials said the aircraft lost contact with the Jakarta air traffic control tower at 6.17am local time (11.17am NZT).

A spokesman said the last communication from the pilot was asking permission to change the height from 32,000 to 34,000 feet due to bad weather. It had been described as "an unusual route".

If it lost contact at 11.17am NZT, and it is now 6.12pm NZT, that is way over six hours that it has been missing.
 
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  • #5
http://avherald.com/h?article=47f6abc7
A radar screenshot leaked from AirNav Indonesia shows the aircraft had turned left off the airway and was climbing through FL363, the speed over ground had decayed to 353 knots however.
indonesia_asia_a320_pk-axc_java_sea_141228_1.jpg
 
  • #6
Greg Bernhardt said:
Ugh, so much for "turbulence never brings down a plane"
Jeez, who goes round making that statement?
 
  • #7
- Contact with the plane was lost around an hour after departure, somewhere over the Java Sea between Belitung island and Pontianak, on Indonesia's part of Kalimantan island. This happened a few minutes after the pilot requested to Indonesia's air traffic control — but was declined — to fly higher to avoid stormy weather.

- Ongoing search and rescue operations with military assets deployed from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and most recently Australia resumed on Monday morning scouring both the land and sea area in the northern and eastern parts of Belitung island.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/contact-w...r-singapore-from-surabaya-lost-033803688.html
 
  • #8
2014 ...The worst year for aviation ...for now.
2 more days to go ,keep your fingers crossed.
 
  • #9
Lost plane's request to change course was denied
http://news.yahoo.com/indonesian-official-prospects-bleak-missing-jet-065646556.html

. . . .
The last communication from the cockpit to air traffic control was a request by one of the pilots to climb from 32,000 feet (9,754 meters) to 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) because of the rough weather. The tower was not able to immediately comply because of the other planes, said Bambang Tjahjono, director of the state-owned company in charge of air traffic control.

When planes confront storms, they generally veer left or right, said Sarjono Joni, a former pilot with a state-run Indonesian carrier. A request to climb would most likely come if the plane were experiencing heavy turbulence, he said, and heavy traffic is not unusual for any given airspace.
. . . .

https://www.yahoo.com/travel/airasia-crash-begs-question-can-severe-weather-106436287397.html
“Airplanes can fly through weather,” explains John Goglia, the only FAA-licensed aircraft mechanic who served as a board member of the National Transportation Safety Board. “But it’s a concern. That’s why the airlines have dispatchers and meteorologists.” He notes that severe weather can be quite hazardous during takeoff and landing, but requests for altitude changes inflight to avoid worsening weather — such as the request by the crew of QZ8501 — are quite common.
 
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  • #10
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11380170

Aviation experts have speculated that the flight may have encountered "black storm cells" which caused a build-up of ice on airspeed senors known as pitot tubes.

The A320, while sophisticated, is not equipped with the latest radar, Mr Thomas said.

The radar used by the A320 can sometimes have problems in thunderstorms and the pilot may have been deceived by the severity of these particular ones.

The latest technology radars, which were pioneered by Qantas in 2002, can give a more complete and accurate reading of a thunderstorm, but they will not be certified for the A320 until next year.

"If you don't have what's called a multi-skilled radar you have to tilt the radar yourself manually, you have to look down to the base of the thunderstorm to see what the intensity of the moisture and the rain is, then you make a judgment of how bad it is.

"It's manual, so it's possible to make a mistake, it has happened."
 
  • #11
Monsterboy said:
2014 ...The worst year for aviation ...for now.
2 more days to go ,keep your fingers crossed.
Worst based on what metric?

In terms of total deaths, it is the worst in the past 8, but that's it (1320). By number of airliner crashes, it is the lowest in 86 years (111). It just happens that several large planes crashed.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/29/travel/aviation-year-in-review/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Of course, if you are an American, you may object to including planes that were shot down and planes that were from 3rd world countries in the calculation of your safety. For US domestic airlines, there has only been one fatal crash in the past 4 years, a UPS cargo plane, killing two people, in 2013. https://ntsb.gov/news/2014/140915b.html

So I'd rate 2014 to be a pretty safe year by most metrics.
 
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  • #12
  • #14
The last plane that went missing in Asia made news that was followed constantly by CNN for 30 days straight. This time the pilot asked to change direction to avoid a storm and was allowed to do so. When the pilot asked to increase altitude to 38,000 ft. the request was denied because another plane was at that altitude. More in the link.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30626734
 
  • #15
russ_watters said:
Worst based on what metric?
The worst year since i started watching news ,that's somewhat near 8 years.
 
  • #16
When plane crashes there are no injured passengers
 
  • #19
So sad. Condolences to the passengers' grieving family and friends :(.
 
  • #20
The news media have been heartless in their efforts to get pictures of the grieving relatives. Swarms of reporters shoving cameras in the faces of relatives as they try to get to the airport crisis area.

What idiot decided that it would be a good idea to show live news coverage to the relatives of a search where it was highly probable that floating bodies would eventually be spotted? Oh, so sorry that you saw your dead relatives floating in the water. We promise not to show that again but we'll be sure to show endless video of the hysterical and fainting relatives that saw it.

Reminds me of the Eagles song Dirty Laundry.
We got the bubble headed
Bleached blonde
Comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash
With a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry

Can we film the operation
Is the head dead yet
You know the boys in the newsroom
Got a running bet
Get the widow on the set
We need dirty laundry
 
  • #21
I can't understand the mentally of showing images of floating dead bodies. I certainly do not want to see them. I believe it was reported when one image was shown a lady had to be escorted out of the room - still screaming.
 
  • #22
StevieTNZ said:
I can't understand the mentally of showing images of floating dead bodies. I certainly do not want to see them. I believe it was reported when one image was shown a lady had to be escorted out of the room - still screaming.
AirAsia Relatives in Shock as Indonesian TV Airs Images of Floating Body
when graphic news images of a body were shown on TV screens set up in family waiting areas, dozens burst into hysterical wailing. At least two people fainted and were carried out to waiting ambulances.
Police officers in blue berets prevented dozens of press from entering the building, but that didn’t stop journalists pressing up against the windows. Inside, food cartons and other paper objects were torn up and used to cover the glass to prevent media from looking in.
 
  • #23
A Washington Post article suggests that that the plane may have stalled after making a very steep climb.
Radar records, however, suggest that the plane made an “unbelievably” steep climb before it crashed, raising speculation that the aircraft could have stalled during the ascent, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a source familiar with the probe’s initial findings.

“So far, the numbers taken by the radar are unbelievably high. This rate of climb is very high, too high. It appears to be beyond the performance envelope of the aircraft,” Reuters quoted the source as saying.
 
  • #24
Greg Bernhardt said:
I thought planes had heaters for the pitot tubes now
It talks about recommendations in the wiki link, but it isn't clear to me if they are required. The thing is, this problem is pretty ordinary and airplanes have lots of different ways to tell how fast they are going and what they are doing, so the loss of airspeed reliability from the pitot tube shouldn't be much more than an annoyance.
 
  • #25
russ_watters said:
It talks about recommendations in the wiki link, but it isn't clear to me if they are required. The thing is, this problem is pretty ordinary and airplanes have lots of different ways to tell how fast they are going and what they are doing, so the loss of airspeed reliability from the pitot tube shouldn't be much more than an annoyance.
True but it might be more than annoyance of you are in severe turbulence
 
  • #26
russ_watters said:
loss of airspeed reliability from the pitot tube shouldn't be much more than an annoyance.
Depends. Air France XXX took so long on black box recovery and investigation that I missed a lot of what was and was not established regarding auto-pilot and alternate logic possibilities, but the bottom line, if I recall correctly, was that Airbus auto-pilots at the time could fly into an unrecoverable stall based on bad data inputs and hierarchies of "trusted data" before coming out of their digital comas and hollering for a live pilot. Whether that was established as a cause for Air France, I do not know, but the identification of that possibility is something that I would think would have been addressed in the time since that event. If it hasn't been, and contributed to this event, there are apt to be some dramatic consequences.
 
  • #27
IMO it looks like an automation and weather radar failure that lead the pilot to get too deep into the storm-front that others flew into fine. Automation can keep the plane fairly stable until the edge of the control envelope but then it's up to the pilot to actually fly out. It might have been at the aerodynamic/physical limits making it just impossible to go around. The radar can only see the water reflections not true air speed movements ahead especially when conditions change rapidly like in tropical storm cells. It might be just rain or heavy hail in a updraft that will flame-out an engine or reduce real air speed to a stall. Was a passenger in a C5A landing at Clark AFB in a small Typhoon, the updrafts were the scariest roller-coaster ride x10. My heart goes out the the relatives.
 
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  • #28
Bystander said:
Depends. Air France XXX took so long on black box recovery and investigation that I missed a lot of what was and was not established regarding auto-pilot and alternate logic possibilities, but the bottom line, if I recall correctly, was that Airbus auto-pilots at the time could fly into an unrecoverable stall based on bad data inputs and hierarchies of "trusted data" before coming out of their digital comas and hollering for a live pilot. Whether that was established as a cause for Air France, I do not know, but the identification of that possibility is something that I would think would have been addressed in the time since that event. If it hasn't been, and contributed to this event, there are apt to be some dramatic consequences.
The Air France crash was caused by one of the co-pilots holding the control stick all the way back for the duration of the event, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew. A pretty dumbfoundingly, spectacularly basic error.

The loss of airspeed indication for the Air France plane was temporary and resulted only in the disengaging of the autopilot. For most of the duration of the incident, the airspeed indication was fine.

The report of the Asia Air flight zooming upwards is an eerie sign of similarity.
 
  • #29
It's interesting that you mentioned hail. I been wondering if it is possible if hail could have knocked out the front windshield. If something like that happened, I would think that the wind at that speed would throw the stick back causing the aircraft pull straight up and stall (or even breakup in-flight). But, I don't know if hail that's big enough to cause that kind of damage can even get to that altitude. Haven't had the pleasure of landing in a typhoon but, my worst flight was just bad enough for the Coke on my tray table to decide that it preferred to be on the ceiling.
 
  • #30
http://www.3news.co.nz/world/airasia-two-big-parts-of-plane-found-2015010316

Search teams have found two big parts of AirAsia Flight 8501, which crashed into the sea last weekend with 162 people on board, the Indonesian chief of the operation says.

"With the discovery of an oil spill and two big parts of the aircraft, I can assure you these are the parts of the AirAsia plane we have been looking for," search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo told reporters.

Also:
The plane was flying on an unauthorised schedule, said director general of air transport Djoko Murjatmodjo.

"It violated the route permit given, the schedule given, that's the problem," he said.

"AirAsia's permit for the route has been frozen because it violated the route permit given."

He said the permit would be frozen until investigations were completed.

A statement from transport ministry spokesman J.A. Barata said AirAsia was not permitted to fly the Surabaya-Singapore route on Sundays and had not asked to change its schedule.

AirAsia had a permit to serve the route only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, a ministry spokesman said.
 
  • #33
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  • #34
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  • #35
Divers Recover Second Black Box from Crashed AirAsia Jet
https://gma.yahoo.com/crashed-airasia-jets-second-black-box-recovered-031918870--abc-news-topstories.html
Search and rescue teams have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from AirAsia Flight 8501, the second black box recovered in as many days, Malaysian authorities said.

The black box was freed from beneath the wing early Tuesday from a depth of about 100 feet, Indonesian Transportation Ministry official Tonny Budiono told The Associated Press.

Divers on Monday retrieved the first black box containing the flight's data recorder from the floor of the Java Sea two weeks after the plane crashed, killing the 162 people on board.
 
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