AirAsia flight QZ8501: Crashed jet found on ocean floor: rescuers

[webfact]

FLIGHT QZ8501
Crashed jet found on ocean floor: rescuers
Reuters
PANGKALAN BUN/SURABAYA, Indonesia


Reuters

Victim with life jacket on raises questions about last moments; 7 bodies recovered from sea

JAKARTA: -- A body recovered yesterday from the crashed AirAsia plane was wearing a life jacket, an Indonesian search-and-rescue official said, raising new questions about how the disaster unfolded.

Rescuers believe they have found the plane on the ocean floor off Borneo, after sonar detected a large, dark object beneath waters near where debris and bodies were found on the surface.

Ships and planes had been scouring the Java Sea for Flight QZ8501 since Sunday, when it lost contact during bad weather about 40 minutes into its flight from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore.

Seven bodies have been recovered from the sea, some fully clothed, which could indicate the Airbus A320-200 was intact when it hit the water. That would support a theory that it suffered an aerodynamic stall.

The fact that one person had a life jacket on suggests that those on board had time before the aircraft hit the water, or before it sank.

And yet the pilots did not issue a distress signal. The plane disappeared after it asked for permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather.

"This morning, we recovered a total of four bodies and one of them was wearing a life jacket," Tatang Zaenudin, an official with the search-and-rescue agency, said.

He declined to speculate on what the find might mean.

A pilot who works for a Gulf carrier said the life jacket indicated the cause of the crash was not "catastrophic failure". Instead, the plane could have stalled and then come down, possibly because its instruments iced up and gave the pilots inaccurate readings.

"There was time. It means the thing didn't just fall out of the sky," said the pilot, who declined to be identified. He said it could take a minute for a plane to come down from 30,000 feet and the pilots could have experienced "tunnel vision... too overloaded" to send a distress call.

"The first train of thought when you get into a situation like that is to fly the aircraft."

Most of those on board were Indonesians. No survivors have been found.

Hernanto, head of the search and rescue agency in Surabaya, said rescuers believed they had found the plane on the sea bed with a sonar scan in water 30-50 metres deep. The black box flight data and cockpit voice recorder are yet to be found. Authorities in Surabaya were making preparations to receive and identify bodies, including arranging 130 ambulances to take victims to a police hospital and collecting DNA from relatives.

"We are praying it is the plane so the evacuation can be done quickly," Hernanto said.

Strong wind and waves hampered the search and with visibility at less than a kilometre, the air operation was called off in the afternoon.

"We are all standing by," Dwi Putranto, heading the airforce search effort in Pangalan Bun on Borneo, said. "If we want to evacuate bodies from the water, it's too difficult. The waves are huge and it's raining."

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said his priority was retrieving the bodies.

Relatives, many of whom collapsed in grief when they saw the first grim television pictures confirming their fears on Tuesday, held prayers at a crisis centre at Surabaya airport.

AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes described the crash as his "worst nightmare".

Experienced pilot

The plane was travelling at 32,000 feet and had asked to rise to 38,000 feet. When air traffic controllers granted permission for a rise to 34,000 feet a few minutes later, they received no response.

Online discussion among pilots has centred on unconfirmed secondary radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might have stalled.

Investigators are focusing initially on whether the crew took too long to request permission to climb, or could have ascended on their own initiative earlier, said a source close to the inquiry, adding that poor weather could have played a part as well.

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours under his belt and the plane last underwent maintenance in mid-November, said the airline, which is 49 per cent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia.

Three airline disasters involving Malaysian-affiliated carriers in less than a year have dented confidence in the country's aviation industry and spooked travellers.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing in March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew and has not been found. On July 17, the same airline's flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard.

On board flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French.

The AirAsia group, including affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India, has not suffered a crash since its Malaysian budget operations began in 2002.

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/Crashed-jet-found-on-ocean-floor-rescuers-30251058.html


-- The Nation 2015-01-01

[F430murci]

Article I posted in other thread said no one was found with life jacket.

[Dannyboy666]

Why No Pings from BB's

[Crossy]

Yes F430, I understand that the official in question has recanted, no bodies with life vests.

As to why no pings, possibly no one has listened for them, they have the aircraft.

[krisb]

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours

So it wasn't 20thousand hours??

[krisb]

Yes F430, I understand that the official in question has recanted, no bodies with life vests.

As to why no pings, possibly no one has listened for them, they have the aircraft.

Assume they do.

"We are praying it is the plane so the evacuation can be done quickly," Hernanto said.

[draftvader]

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours

So it wasn't 20thousand hours??

Yes, glad you picked that up.

[NongKhaiKid]

If I heard the television news correctly Tony Fernandes has denied the plane has been found.

Let's hope this doesn't become another MH370 situation with officials making statements without the full facts.

Edited December 31, 2014 by NongKhaiKid

[draftvader]

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours

So it wasn't 20thousand hours??

Yes, glad you picked that up.

Ah, found the problem. It was 6,100 hours with Air Asia. 20,000 career hours.

[krisb]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

[bdenner]

In an updated press release Indonesia Air Asia clarified the captain had a total of 20,537 flying hours, thereof 6100 hours for Indonesia Air Asia, the first officer had 2,275 hours total with Indonesia Air Asia.

From avherald.com

[MrWorldwide]

Yes F430, I understand that the official in question has recanted, no bodies with life vests.

As to why no pings, possibly no one has listened for them, they have the aircraft.

Disgraceful on the part of the official - even if that was the information he had received, surely the responsible thing to do would be to clarify his statement with 'we are awaiting confirmation'. After the bozos at TV One who elected to show footage of bodies being recovered from the ocean, our friend has given the relatives waiting in Surabaya a mental image that many of them would struggle with : people bobbing around in the ocean waiting to be rescued. As we saw with MH370, one of the early stages of grief is anger - I'd be mad as hell if there was any suggestion that the initial delays in getting the SAR teams to the projected crash site effectively killed survivors - pure speculation, but that's precisely what a statement like that feeds into. As horrific as their last moments would have been, those still trapped in the aircraft wouldnt have had to endure hypothermia or exposure. The sooner they retrieve the fuselage, the better IMO.

[F430murci]

Saying they have no found fuselage yet. Saying the are recanting that statement, but that is from news here in States.

[NeverSure]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

I'm not saying it was icing. But it takes a certain set of meteorological conditions. The air and airframe have to be freezing at the same time that there is liquid moisture in the air that can freeze to the airframe. It usually freezes to the leading edges.

Think of freezing rain or frost, but the plane is traveling so fast it encounters or collects more moisture.

[krisb]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

I'm not saying it was icing. But it takes a certain set of meteorological conditions. The air and airframe have to be freezing at the same time that there is liquid moisture in the air that can freeze to the airframe. It usually freezes to the leading edges.

Think of freezing rain or frost, but the plane is traveling so fast it encounters or collects more moisture.

So why wouldn't it happen more often in say Alaska?

[neverdie]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

I'm not saying it was icing. But it takes a certain set of meteorological conditions. The air and airframe have to be freezing at the same time that there is liquid moisture in the air that can freeze to the airframe. It usually freezes to the leading edges.

Think of freezing rain or frost, but the plane is traveling so fast it encounters or collects more moisture.

So why wouldn't it happen more often in say Alaska?

There are various aircraft systems that deal with icing & to answer you question, it does happen often in colder climates, hence everything from de-icing on the ground to various systems such as electro-mechanical heated strips to pneumatic systems to counter icing.

Icing is just one of the problems pilots can face with the weather.

I saw a claim this morning that radar data suggests the plane was not only travelling extremely slow just prior to dropping off radar but in its last moments it suddenly climbed at a rate which is not sustainable by this type of a/c.

Obviously I don't know how true that claim is and I'm not sure if it meant the planes auto systems had malfunctioned or whether it was being handled manually but there's about a thousand and one scenarios that could of happened following that.

Fortunately flight recorder data should be available soon and will hopefully reveal all.

Edited January 1, 2015 by neverdie

[krisb]

ND summed it up.

Fortunately flight recorder data should be available soon and will hopefully reveal all.

[tartempion]

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours

So it wasn't 20thousand hours??

Yes, glad you picked that up.

When will you people get your information right?

The airline's CEO said in a press conference later, that the captain actually had more than 20,000 hours of total flying experience and was nearing 7000 hours with Indonesia Air Asia (but it should be 6100 with AA)

The airline confirmed that radar and radio contact was lost at 07:24L (00:24Z). An emergency hotline has been established for relatives of passengers on the flight. The aircraft carried 155 passengers (including one infant and 16 children), 2 pilots, 4 cabin crew and one engineer. The captain had 6,100 hours total experience, the first officer 2,275 hours of total flying experience.

and the only reliable source for information is the aviation herald, much (95%?) of what is published here is rubbish.

Edited January 1, 2015 by tartempion

[lvr181]

If I heard the television news correctly Tony Fernandes has denied the plane has been found.

Let's hope this doesn't become another MH370 situation with officials making statements without the full facts.

You trust the news media? They can be terrible twisters of "facts", outright speculators, misinformation (their fault or there sources fault) and then publish and be damned! They are in the business of business i.e. making money. High readership or listeners equals higher advertising revenue. Bottom line.

Those in the news media only have one other source of work - become a politician! Get the connection?

[petedk]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

Because they are de-iced before take-off

[Don Aleman]

In defense, although he/they, don't really need any for atop notch airline and super founder it should be pointed out that this is not solely an Asia Airlines situation. In order to penetrate some countries Tony Fernandes, owner, had to team up with other nations carriers so it is possible the pilots were Indonesian and, possibly even the plane was a " licensed " unit not an actual AA aircraft.

Personally I never " partnered " up in golf/pinochle or anything and now, if the above is true, Tony may sever other connections.

[krisb]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

Because they are de-iced before take-off

Different type of icing.

Edited January 1, 2015 by krisb

[petedk]

Again the Indoesian and Malaysian authorities have been heavily criticised for their information service. First saying one thing and then shortly after recanting.

The plane hasn't been found yet. Only an hour ago I saw that they are continuing to search for it. There were reports yesterday that someone saw a "shadow" on the sea bed.

[Robby nz]

I suspect that there is little understanding of what is meant by sonar.

There is a great deal of difference from the normal echo sounders that an ordinary ship or small boat would carry and the sophisticated computer linked towed array systems that are used for accurate underwater mapping.

In a rough sea such as they are working in, even in shallow water, a normal sounder will not give accurate readings of smaller objects on the sea bed.

I have used both of the above and have a good idea how they work.

From what I have read the shadow in the water was seen from the air and not from a boat or detected by any acoustic means. There was a report of things that appeared to be parts of a plane detected by sonar.

Conflicting reports certainly don't help and the weather in the are is reported to be bad and forecast to get worse so it is likely that nothing positive will be found until the weather improves.

By then they should have more gear on site to do a survey and also sensors that can pick up the transmissions from the black boxes.

[CapeCobra]

So if it was icing, why don't planes ice up in cold countries more often?

I'm not saying it was icing. But it takes a certain set of meteorological conditions. The air and airframe have to be freezing at the same time that there is liquid moisture in the air that can freeze to the airframe. It usually freezes to the leading edges.

Think of freezing rain or frost, but the plane is traveling so fast it encounters or collects more moisture.

So why wouldn't it happen more often in say Alaska?

There are various aircraft systems that deal with icing & to answer you question, it does happen often in colder climates, hence everything from de-icing on the ground to various systems such as electro-mechanical heated strips to pneumatic systems to counter icing.

Icing is just one of the problems pilots can face with the weather.

I saw a claim this morning that radar data suggests the plane was not only travelling extremely slow just prior to dropping off radar but in its last moments it suddenly climbed at a rate which is not sustainable by this type of a/c.

Obviously I don't know how true that claim is and I'm not sure if it meant the planes auto systems had malfunctioned or whether it was being handled manually but there's about a thousand and one scenarios that could of happened following that.

Fortunately flight recorder data should be available soon and will hopefully reveal all.

When the air is moist, ice can form in temperatures as high as 25 degree Celsius.

Pitot icing happened to me once in a Piper Cherokee climbing through clouds to only 10000 feet. On a climb your indicated airspeed will be lower than actual. On a descent the opposite is true. A blocked pitot tube causes the instrument to show a much higher speed than actual. If the pilot reduces the speed not recognizing being fooled, a dangerous situation can evolve. Losing all pressure instruments and without visual info in clouds can be a scary experience. It happened to me in a warm country. There is speculation that this Airbus stalled when the actual airspeed got too low. Let's see what the black box will reveal.

R.I.P. to the victims, consolation to their families and a prosperous New Year to everybody else.

CapeCobra

[MrWorldwide]

I'd appreciate comment on this from anyone with an understanding of the structure of any of the main commercial aircraft and - hopefully - the physics of bring something up from deep water. This is a simplistic suggestion and I fully expect that there are plenty of reasons why it wont work, but here goes:

Reading the Wikpedia entry on the Air France disaster that required teams to spend 2 years searching in very deep water, I came across the entry on UAVs -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_underwater_vehicle

No question that this is a specialised and presumably very expensive robot, but the version I'm envisaging would be considerably smaller and simpler. If the UAVs have a propulsion system, surely they could design one which would deploy automatically at a given depth, ascending to the surface and transmitting a distress call/co-ordinates ? if we cant build sensors that can reliably tell a robot that it's 50 metres below the surface of the ocean in 2014, then perhaps everything I've seen on the telly is just another Star Trek rerun.

The obvious gotcha with something which would be ejected from the aircraft is that you have the potential for a 'bomb' to be dropped in the event of a malfunction but given the number of failsafes they already have to build into any avionics system, that would be just one more challenge for the engineers and maintenance crews. A trickier question might be where the robot could be stored and deployed - again, I'll leave that to the board's engineering minds. I'm sure the beancounters at the airlines wouldnt be thrilled by the need to add more cost to the purchase and maintenance of an aircraft, but if its part of the cost of maintaining a brand then I think they'll come round.

As I said, its purely a suggestion and may be completely off beam - for all I know Boeing and others are already building a better solution into their new aircraft but it seems odd that this far into the 21st century we still cant reliably pinpoint the location of an aircraft lost at sea, whatever the realities of older technology and various satellite monitoring systems. Happy to hear your feedback on this suggestion.

[draftvader]

I'm not saying it was icing. But it takes a certain set of meteorological conditions. The air and airframe have to be freezing at the same time that there is liquid moisture in the air that can freeze to the airframe. It usually freezes to the leading edges.

Think of freezing rain or frost, but the plane is traveling so fast it encounters or collects more moisture.

So why wouldn't it happen more often in say Alaska?

There are various aircraft systems that deal with icing & to answer you question, it does happen often in colder climates, hence everything from de-icing on the ground to various systems such as electro-mechanical heated strips to pneumatic systems to counter icing.

Icing is just one of the problems pilots can face with the weather.

I saw a claim this morning that radar data suggests the plane was not only travelling extremely slow just prior to dropping off radar but in its last moments it suddenly climbed at a rate which is not sustainable by this type of a/c.

Obviously I don't know how true that claim is and I'm not sure if it meant the planes auto systems had malfunctioned or whether it was being handled manually but there's about a thousand and one scenarios that could of happened following that.

Fortunately flight recorder data should be available soon and will hopefully reveal all.

When the air is moist, ice can form in temperatures as high as 25 degree Celsius.

Pitot icing happened to me once in a Piper Cherokee climbing through clouds to only 10000 feet. On a climb your indicated airspeed will be lower than actual. On a descent the opposite is true. A blocked pitot tube causes the instrument to show a much higher speed than actual. If the pilot reduces the speed not recognizing being fooled, a dangerous situation can evolve. Losing all pressure instruments and without visual info in clouds can be a scary experience. It happened to me in a warm country. There is speculation that this Airbus stalled when the actual airspeed got too low. Let's see what the black box will reveal.

R.I.P. to the victims, consolation to their families and a prosperous New Year to everybody else.

CapeCobra

I bought this up on another thread on this subject but there was an incident on Nov 5th that happened on another Airbus in the same family - http://www.aeroinside.com/item/4946/lufthansa-a321-near-bilbao-on-nov-5th-2014-loss-of-4000-feet-of-altitude

This triggered the following Airworthiness Directive on December 9th - http://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/2014-0266-E (read the pdf for more) which is an operational procedure update. This AD is a temporary measure whilst they look at the mechanical issues.

[Asiantravel]

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours

So it wasn't 20thousand hours??

" AirAsia said the captain more than 20,000 flying hours, of which 6,100 were with AirAsia on the Airbus 320. The first officer had 2,275 flying hours. "

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/other-world/missing-airasia-flight-pilot-had-logged-20-000-hours-1.1433454

[than]

Well one body recover with life jacket this show that cabin has been prepared for emergency landind , if post-mortem examination show some passager survive to crash, this rise question about quality of management of rescue by Indonesia. Indonesia quickly stop search in the first day.......

[car720]

Yes F430, I understand that the official in question has recanted, no bodies with life vests.

As to why no pings, possibly no one has listened for them, they have the aircraft.

Disgraceful on the part of the official - even if that was the information he had received, surely the responsible thing to do would be to clarify his statement with 'we are awaiting confirmation'. After the bozos at TV One who elected to show footage of bodies being recovered from the ocean, our friend has given the relatives waiting in Surabaya a mental image that many of them would struggle with : people bobbing around in the ocean waiting to be rescued. As we saw with MH370, one of the early stages of grief is anger - I'd be mad as hell if there was any suggestion that the initial delays in getting the SAR teams to the projected crash site effectively killed survivors - pure speculation, but that's precisely what a statement like that feeds into. As horrific as their last moments would have been, those still trapped in the aircraft wouldnt have had to endure hypothermia or exposure. The sooner they retrieve the fuselage, the better IMO.

When considering all this there are 2 main points to consider.

Firstly, all airlines were issued with an advisory to install new pitot tubes after the French plane went down, yet here we have an Indonesian plane with possible pitot problems. (ex Garuda anyone?)

Secondly and worth consideration as to why there are always conflicting statements,, can you imagine the damage done to economies if anyone were to even slightly indicate that it was no longer safe to fly.