Air Asia Flight Lost Over Indonesia

  • Thread starter Liquid
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Indonesian ministry of information now uses satelites as well as websites for people to track down the last possible place the plane gone missing. Also the Bangka's goverment now churn out forces too.

Carl the Sloth
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AirAsia has removed all traces of Christmas spirit from its Facebook page upon hearing of the incident.

"For a seamless flying experience!" ...Yeah
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The mood changes goes fast.
 
Keef
It's seeming like the crash was weather related. It's possible the plane flew into heavy turbulence at the top of a thunderhead and was torn apart.
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That would be extremely unusual - the area is heavily flown, and storms like the ones seen in the region are to be expected. An aircraft should be able to withstand the forces exerted by the storms, and the last communication had the pilots trying to avoid the worst of it.

Liquid
South East Asian weather and geology can catch out anyone. Back in the early 80s British Airways 9 flew into an ashcloud, lost all four engines before managing to get one started and limp to an emergency landing. When a similar fate befell a KLM plane, they rerouted the flight path even further away from the volcano in question.
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That was a pretty extreme event - the ash cloud contained extremely fine pieces of glass, bits of molten rock that were thrown in the upper atmosphere where they rapidly cooled and were kept aloft by convection currents radiating upwards from the volcano. The plane effectively flew through a fine mist of glass. It's why most of Europe's airspace was shut down when that volcano in Iceland erupted a few years ago.
 
prisonermonkeys
That would be extremely unusual - the area is heavily flown, and storms like the ones seen in the region are to be expected. An aircraft should be able to withstand the forces exerted by the storms, and the last communication had the pilots trying to avoid the worst of it.
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Was the plane flying at night? If so, the only real-time weather readout they get is the onboard radar which, unlike ground-based radar, isn't powerful enough to see completely through dense storms. There's a phenomena pilots are trained to identify whereby a thunderstorm can be embedded within heavy rain but the rain absorbs all the radar's energy before it gets to the heaviest part, causing a black shadow on the readout. This looks like the storm ends but in fact the radar's energy simply isn't making it all the way through. It's possible that by the time the pilots realized they were looking at a rain shadow they no longer had time to avoid it. Thus the disappearance immediately after they requested a deviation.
 
Keef
Was the plane flying at night?
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The plane lost contact with Jakarta ATC at 6:24am local time. Although they were flying north-west at the time, they were at cruising altitude, so there should have been enough light to see. And their final message was a request to change course, to climb and divert away from the worst of it, so they had to be aware of any storm front ahead of them.

This is probably going to sound stupid, but there is potentially a very simple reason for their immediate lack of communication - they were busy flying the plane. That's the priority, and that's what they would have been focusing on if they had hit trouble. Providing a running commentary of their actions might be nice, but it's not always feasible. The plane could have kept going for some time after the final transmission.

At this point, the most likely explanation is that the pilots increased altitude, stopping just short of the aircraft's operating ceiling when they hit heavy turbulence and went into a stall that they couldn't recover from.
 
prisonermonkeys
The plane lost contact with Jakarta ATC at 6:24am local time. Although they were flying north-west at the time, they were at cruising altitude, so there should have been enough light to see. And their final message was a request to change course, to climb and divert away from the worst of it, so they had to be aware of any storm front ahead of them.

This is probably going to sound stupid, but there is potentially a very simple reason for their immediate lack of communication - they were busy flying the plane. That's the priority, and that's what they would have been focusing on if they had hit trouble. Providing a running commentary of their actions might be nice, but it's not always feasible. The plane could have kept going for some time after the final transmission.

At this point, the most likely explanation is that the pilots increased altitude, stopping just short of the aircraft's operating ceiling when they hit heavy turbulence and went into a stall that they couldn't recover from.
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Unless it was a spiral stall, there is a lot of time to be had to drop from fl340 or wherever they were when the stall occurred.

However, from a meteorologist stand point, these storms shove extremely cold air up very fast. I'm not familiar with Airbus systems and not sure at all about their anti-ice features, but icing is definitely a concern here I wouldn't leave out. If the control surfaces by any chance locked up, and as much auto-pilot as pilots use, they probably would be unaware of a serious situation. Depending on their ice features that could be completely off, but that is my thought of it...

I don't think it is extreme turbulence either. Just last week (or whenever the report came out) American apparently had some bad bumps in the north Pacific. I've been on flights where the Coke jumps out of the glass into zero gravity almost and I have to catch it... A wing won't just break off because of a bump.
 
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Does anyone else have a link to PIREPS (if any) that were sent back to inform others? Flight paths can be looked at on Flightaware but PIREPS is a much better "thing" to have..
 
Keef
It's seeming like the crash was weather related. It's possible the plane flew into heavy turbulence at the top of a thunderhead and was torn apart. The plane lost radio contact and fell off radar only a couple minutes after requesting a course and altitude deviation. It's easy to misread the plane's onboard radar display - do they not have any sort of weather observation systems in this region?
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Assuming the plane was in flightworthy condition, turbulence will not tear an airplane apart, at least not anything that Airbus, Boeing or that other major RJ manufacturers build.
 
Since im an Indonesian, I can tell you several things according to our local news:

1. 10 inflatable objects, fuel tank, and emergency exit door with good condition and shadow of the plane found just 15-20 km from the known missing location.
2. Dead bodies found just near that.


aaaand the news site crashed.
 
last night, a local fisherman from near that crash site reported to one of our TV station that he saw a red and white colored plane, flying very low above water but he didn't see any crash, the plane was flying normally he said, but another fisherman from another point heard a boom and saw a white thingy above the sea.

I think that's the most reliable clue we can get.
 
They said they are 95% sure that they have found the plane, along with several bodies. My thoughts goes out to their families.
 
It won't be long until relatively graphic images show up on Twitter and 4chan regarding the discovery of the bodies. Unfortunately this happened with MH17 and they aren't the most pleasant images I must say, just a heads up for anyone on social media.
 
FrzGT
Since im an Indonesian, I can tell you several things according to our local news:

1. 10 inflatable objects, fuel tank, and emergency exit door with good condition and shadow of the plane found just 15-20 km from the known missing location.
2. Dead bodies found just near that.


aaaand the news site crashed.
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If they found an emergency exit door with good condition, and the shadow of the plane, I wonder if there are survivors out there who managed to swim to nearby beaches (I don't know how far is that though)

UPDATE: they've found 8 bodies, 4 of them are holding hands.
Now I'm pretty sure the emergency landing was successful but no one found them quick enough until they finally can't hold any longer..
 
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Grayfox
Nope.avi

1 Malaysian plane goes missing
1 Malaysian plane gets shot down
1 Indonesian plane run by a subsidiary of a Malaysian air-carrier crashes
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Fixed. A quick Wiki search shows that it's technically still Indonesian owned (by about 1%), but that might simply be a technicality. The big taipans in this region have ways around foreign ownership laws.

So strike three for Malaysian airlines and affiliates this year. Hate to be holding any stock in Malaysian air carriers at this point.
 
Grayfox
Nope.avi

1 Malaysian plane goes missing
1 Malaysian plane gets shot down
1 Indonesian plane crashes
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No.
There was an AWAIR brand which it is an indonesian company spunned off from Malaysian AirAsia. That didnt translated well to profit and the AWAIR goes blended again to AirAsia.
 
niky
Fixed. A quick Wiki search shows that it's technically still Indonesian owned (by about 1%), but that might simply be a technicality. The big taipans in this region have ways around foreign ownership laws.

So strike three for Malaysian airlines and affiliates this year. Hate to be holding any stock in Malaysian air carriers at this point.
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Out of the stocks I have on watch list, Delta dropped only a 1/3 of a point.. Not like its an Asian airline but generally any and all airlines feel the plunge..
 
We're going to find out what happened, chaps. That is good news. It is sad this happened and the pilots couldn't save it but at least we get to figure out what happened.

The news said they see a "shadow" of the plane? Apparently the water isn't very deep in this area?

From the fisherman accounts it sounds like the plane may have glided. But from altitude, the plane could glide dozens of miles. And if the plane were gliding, the pilots would have have plenty of time to declare an emergency .

What gets me is that they requested their deviations and just a few minutes later dropped below the altitude where radar could detect them. You can make an airplane drop altitude that quickly and you would do so in a situation like an explosive decompression. You'd drop down to 10,000 feet in just a couple minutes. Stalling at altitude and failing to recover might do that also. I'd say either something very taxing happened that didn't allow them to jump on the radio or something catastrophic happened at altitude and they never had a chance to.
 
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Keef
We're going to find out what happened, chaps. That is good news. It is sad this happened and the pilots couldn't save it but at least we get to figure out what happened.

The news said they see a "shadow" of the plane? Apparently the water isn't very deep in this area?
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From the rescue mission of the woman's body now viral, the water did seem quite shallow with a light green shade...

It would be nice if the weather could stop there though..
 

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