AirAsia flight from Indonesia to Singapore missing

[Humpy]

Planes can go through storms just fine.

In light of the obvious, that seems like an odd way to start off a post that just gets worse.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

In light of the obvious, that seems like an odd way to start off a post that just gets worse.

Do you also think buses can't drive on roads because buses crash from time to time?

 

[Humpy]

Do you also think buses can't drive on roads because buses crash from time to time?

No. Why would I think that?

I see now that to you "just fine" means "just fine until they crash and everyone dies". That's just fine.

 

[Artorias]

Wouldn't you just fly above the clouds to avoid the issue? At least temporally giving you some more options.

 

[AmdEmAll]

Wouldn't you just fly above the clouds to avoid the issue? At least temporally giving you some more options.

I read somewhere that thunderstorm tops were over 52k feet.. A320 doesn't operate that high. Also they wanted 38k feet but the tower denied them for some reason.

 

[Mermaidman]

If not for the lives lost, this would be satisfying irony:
Air Asia in-flight magazine following missing MH370:
"Pilot training in AirAsia is continuous and very thorough. Rest assured that your captain is well prepared to ensure your plane will never get lost."

I wonder if equipment stress is a factor in this accident. The aircraft operates a short haul route and Airbus said the plane had "accumulated approximately 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights."

 

[CZroe]

E

Lovely. I wondered if people would take it the wrong way. By the sounds of it, both of you thought I was referring to aliens or some conspiracy.

Three flights "missing" (to clarify, I quote because one of you quoted, not to mean it's a conspiracy), all operated by carriers from one country in a single year -- yes, other planes go "missing", but three in one year is a bit of a bigger problem. I was thinking of a possible culture or government oversight issue like the one Malcolm Gladwell noted about Korean Air.

Woooooo aliens!

YOU don't get what he is saying. Freshly crashed and not reached yet is not "missing" in the Flight 370 sense and yet people started calling it that moments after it disappeared.

Let's say that I crashed my car and responders were now coming to find me based on my planned route and last known position. My car isn't really "missing" until they have looked there to realize that it is not where they would expect to find it even if something went wrong.

Is the plane missing because the debris washed up three hours later versus 12 minutes? Is is missing because it took more than 12 hours to locate the crash site? Where do we draw that line? Give it a couple days before you declare this a mystery. Let them get a boat out there to listen for the pings. Sheesh.

 

[darkxshade]

So wtf is going on? Is the blackbox and GPS beacon not working this time too?

 

[GTaudiophile]

The folks on at airliners.net are drawing more parallels to AF447 and pitot tube freezing problems.

If this is another MH370 then I have to think the 'airplane hacking' theory may have more credence. North Korea anyone?

 

[NikolaeVarius]

So wtf is going on? Is the blackbox and GPS beacon not working this time too?

Black Boxes don't actively transmit location data and the GPS wouldn't tell the planes active location if the power systems all simultaneously failed. Also in this case, they know exactly where the airplane was last. But an airplane at cruising altitude can travel a while before crashing into the ground.

The folks on at airliners.net are drawing more parallels to AF447 and pitot tube freezing problems.

If this is another MH370 then I have to think the 'airplane hacking' theory may have more credence. North Korea anyone?

I doubt it, the pitot tube freezing problem was a large series of failures, not a single thing. It's unlikely the exact same issue happened.

As for Airplane hacking, do you think really think airplanes install code/programs while flying? Also, airplane code is extremely well guarded industry proprietary stuff.

 

[John Connor]

Shouldn't a sat connection at least show where they were last? Also there was no mayday so what ever happened it was catastrophic.

 

[Imp]

Wikipedia says AirAsia is headquartered in Malaysia. When does it stop being just a coincidence...

I bet there have been multiple non-Malaysian crashes.

At this point, it's only "missing" because the search isn't done. It just happened. It takes a while to get the right crews to that location.

E

YOU don't get what he is saying. Freshly crashed and not reached yet is not "missing" in the Flight 370 sense and yet people started calling it that moments after it disappeared.

Let's say that I crashed my car and responders were now coming to find me based on my planned route and last known position. My car isn't really "missing" until they have looked there to realize that it is not where they would expect to find it even if something went wrong.

Is the plane missing because the debris washed up three hours later versus 12 minutes? Is is missing because it took more than 12 hours to locate the crash site? Where do we draw that line? Give it a couple days before you declare this a mystery. Let them get a boat out there to listen for the pings. Sheesh.

What are you going on about? I didn't even argue anything about "missing."

The whole point of my response was that "missing" was irrelevant because I never brought it up initially. I didn't even say the word "crash." You, and the others, assumed that I was in bed with the conspiracy theorists. There was a miscommunication due to assumptions being made and the vagueness of my initial post.

Check my unedited, original post. It was vague as hell, but it said NOTHING about anything being "missing" or there being a mystery or conspiracy -- you can't even find that word in my original post. The only implication in my post was that there was a potential problem related to Malaysia with 3 planes going down in the same year operated by companies based there -- my actual thought was a cultural-based issue like one how you don't argue with or point out the mistakes of an authority figure that is common in Asia.

 

[Hugo Drax]

Profits over people. The airliner knew the weather condition. Hailstorms and a large number of severe thunderstorm with tops as high as 50,000ft. And the flight path was so tight that they were denied the deviation to flight level 380.

They should have delayed all flights until the conditions permitted a safe flight.

 

[LTC8K6]

So wtf is going on? Is the blackbox and GPS beacon not working this time too?

There is no "GPS beacon".

The onboard ELT is primarily designed for a crash on land, and is of little use in a water crash. It does not work under water.

The portable and raft mounted ELTs are primarily designed for a water landing, or ditching. The intent is for the survivors to activate them. They are also not meant for a water crash, and also will not work under water.

The black boxes are presumably under water, and you have to get close to them to hear them. There is no expectation of hearing them yet.

There is no emergency transmitter designed to locate the airplane in the event of a catastrophic crash in the water.

The only such transmitters are the beacons on the black boxes.

There is no expectation of any signal from any modern airliner after it crashes into water, except for the black box beacons.

 

[LTC8K6]

The folks on at airliners.net are drawing more parallels to AF447 and pitot tube freezing problems.

If this is another MH370 then I have to think the 'airplane hacking' theory may have more credence. North Korea anyone?

There was never any credence to the 777 hacking theory, nor is there any for an A320 hacking theory, despite what people write on the internet.

 

[LTC8K6]

Profits over people. The airliner knew the weather condition. Hailstorms and a large number of severe thunderstorm with tops as high as 50,000ft. And the flight path was so tight that they were denied the deviation to flight level 380.

They should have delayed all flights until the conditions permitted a safe flight.

In that area, you would rarely have any flights under those rules.

 

[LTC8K6]

Wikipedia says AirAsia is headquartered in Malaysia. When does it stop being just a coincidence...

The airline is based in Jakarta, Indonesia, not Malaysia.

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

 

[LTC8K6]

... WTF?! They force flights through the center of storms due to strict flight paths? Having no allowances or plan B is insane.

We can see from the track that they deviated well to their left to avoid weather.
The dotted line from TAVIP to RAFIS is the normal path. In the lower right you can see TAV, the first three letters of TAVIP waypoint.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/QZ8501_secondary_radar_image.jpg

 

[LTC8K6]

https://twitter.com/tomphillipsin/status/549408445321842688/photo/1

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5_kDIICAAAYLOC.jpg:large

 

[Jeff7]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asi...ng&ns_source=twitter&ns_linkname=news_central

It has been a horrible year for air disasters.

Or...
Not a good year, but it doesn't sound like it's really an outlier.

 

[Imp]

The airline is based in Jakarta, Indonesia, not Malaysia.

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

Oh, shit. I was looking at the AirAsia.

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

 

[Dari]

Or...
Not a good year, but it doesn't sound like it's really an outlier.

Oh, shit. I was looking at the AirAsia.

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

Same company.

 

[LTC8K6]

Oh, shit. I was looking at the AirAsia.

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

It's quite confusing.

 

[LTC8K6]

Some new details from AirNav Indonesia:

06:12

- QZ8501 requests left deviation from airway. Deviation approved.
- Pilot then requests climb to FL380
- ATC asks pilot to standby, due to nearby traffic and to coordinate with next sector (Singapore)

06:14

- ATC calls QZ8501 to approve climb to FL340
- No response received after 2 or 3 further attempts to contact
- ATC requests help from nearby aircraft to contact QZ8501

06:16

- ATC still cannot reach QZ8501
- Aircraft still observed on radar screen

06:17

- Radar contact lost
- Last reported altitude: FL290


(Borrowed from pprune)

 

[BUTCH1]

Planes can go through storms just fine. They would just prefer not to in order to minimize risk. Thunderstorms specifically don't get flown through on purpose, and dangerous cells normally show up on doppler.

A plane isn't going to go underneath a storm because that would be dumb. In this case, it doesn't seem that they had a viable route to go around like they normally would.

And if a plane is also flying on a similar path in the air route above another plane, which they commonly do because air traffic is extremely contested space, no sane traffic controller is going to allow the plane to change altitude. Planes need to be kept very very far away from each other.

The above scenario could change if there is some sort of emergency declared by the plane to controllers, but in this case, there wasn't. And if the event really only took 5 minutes from the request, an Airplane simply cannot change altitude that fast on demand. We're talking like 500 feet per minute at best and the plane would have had to climb I believe 4000 feet to make it to the next lane above.

You need to know anything at all about aircraft before you spout nonsense. The Would'a, could'a, and should'a around here is ridiculous at times.

I think your figure of 500 ft/min is wrong, the plane is already at cruising speed, heck when it takes off it's well less than a minute for it to get to 2000ft. and that at 170-225 MPH.