News Air Asia flight QZ8501 missing

Urwumpe

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Looks the search has produced a sonar image of the aircraft wreck but it has not yet been released to the public.

---------- Post added at 03:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:52 AM ----------

Additionally: One victim out of seven recovered until now has been found with life vests on, suggesting that the passengers had time to put them on before or after the impact on the water.

The aircraft did not disintegrate in the air, thats also confirmed by sonar and floating debris. The aircraft is found up-side down in 30-40m deep water, about 3 km away from the first found debris, broken up in big parts (which suggest a slow emergency ditching rather than an uncontrolled high-speed crash).

Currently, 3 meter waves are preventing the deployment of divers to recover the recorders.
 
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boogabooga

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Looks the search has produced a sonar image of the aircraft wreck but it has not yet been released to the public.

---------- Post added at 03:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:52 AM ----------

Additionally: One victim out of seven recovered until now has been found with life vests on, suggesting that the passengers had time to put them on before or after the impact on the water.

The aircraft did not disintegrate in the air, thats also confirmed by sonar and floating debris. The aircraft is found up-side down in 30-40m deep water, about 3 km away from the first found debris, broken up in big parts (which suggest a slow emergency ditching rather than an uncontrolled high-speed crash).

Currently, 3 meter waves are preventing the deployment of divers to recover the recorders.

If that is true, then there could still be survivors. Was the cause of death of life vest person blunt force trauma or dehydration?
 

Urwumpe

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If that is true, then there could still be survivors. Was the cause of death of life vest person blunt force trauma or dehydration?

Could also be simply exhaustion. Most people who drowned did not dehydrate or freeze, but simply died from exhaustion after some hours in the water.

---------- Post added at 10:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:40 PM ----------

Divers? How deep underwater is the crash site?

As said 30-40 metres.
 

garyw

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If a plane ditches, aren't the black boxes meant to immediately send out pulses? Including one to a satellite for quicker rescue?

Additionally: One victim out of seven recovered until now has been found with life vests on, suggesting that the passengers had time to put them on before or after the impact on the water

Or they knew that the plane was going down and hoped for a ditching so prepared for it even without being told......
 

Urwumpe

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If a plane ditches, aren't the black boxes meant to immediately send out pulses? Including one to a satellite for quicker rescue?

Pulses yes, but emergency signal with GPS position is not automatic AFAIR ... makes little sense to send such weak signals in a heap of scrap metal, unlike ships where emergency buoys are used. Some modern FDRs are equipped with ELTs because the FDRs are designed to be ejected from the aircraft during a crash... but not those on older aircraft designs.
 
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Thunder Chicken

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The fact that the aircraft is upside down suggests that the ditching did not go well, if it could even be attempted. The aircraft may have sunk very quickly.

The ELT may well be beeping away, but under a metal aircraft in 150 ft of sea water those signals aren't going to be heard.
 

garyw

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This just got weird.

Some investigators are reported to believe that the plane may have gone into an aerodynamic stall as the pilot climbed steeply to avoid a storm.

Officials quoted by the Reuters news agency say that the plane was travelling at 32,000ft (9,750m) when it requested to climb to 38,000ft to avoid bad weather.

When air traffic controllers consented to allow it to climb to 34,000ft a few minutes later, they got no reply.

Sribudi Siswardani's 31-year-old son was on board AirAsia flight QZ8501 - on his first trip overseas
A source quoted by Reuters said that radar data appeared to show that the aircraft's "unbelievably" steep climb may have been beyond the Airbus A320's limits.

"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," the source said, while emphasising that more information was needed before a definitive conclusion could be reached.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30647375


To me, this allows for only four possibilities:

1. The crew took the aircraft out of normal law ON PURPOSE to climb rapidly - Not very likely as crews are trained to only disabled normal law if something goes very wrong with the computers.

2. The aircraft tripped out of Normal Law because of Pitot icing or something similar and it really is another AF447.

3. The radar readings are wrong, possibly if it's secondary radar. If it's primary radar then it's reading data from the transponder and the transponder is transmitting what it believes the aircraft to be doing which may not be what it is doing.

4. Some sort of weather phenomena we've not seen before, if so, this should be visible on satellite data but no one else reported it.
 

Urwumpe

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This just got weird.



Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30647375


To me, this allows for only four possibilities:

1. The crew took the aircraft out of normal law ON PURPOSE to climb rapidly - Not very likely as crews are trained to only disabled normal law if something goes very wrong with the computers.

2. The aircraft tripped out of Normal Law because of Pitot icing or something similar and it really is another AF447.

3. The radar readings are wrong, possibly if it's secondary radar. If it's primary radar then it's reading data from the transponder and the transponder is transmitting what it believes the aircraft to be doing which may not be what it is doing.

4. Some sort of weather phenomena we've not seen before, if so, this should be visible on satellite data but no one else reported it.

I would also add #5: Asian investigators.

Currently, you also observe the MH370 nonsense there - one organisation claiming to be the only true investigating body and the other one not, and all information of the other group is wrong.
 

Thunder Chicken

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I would also add #5: Asian investigators.

Currently, you also observe the MH370 nonsense there - one organisation claiming to be the only true investigating body and the other one not, and all information of the other group is wrong.

True. Between the lack of coordinated information coming from the authorities and the press attempting to spin it all into a story (whether it is accurate or not), the signal to noise ratio is not great.

Let's hope the black boxes can tell us something concrete.
 

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If it climbed beyond belief and stalled out, how likely is it that it would have crashed as 'lightly' as the damage shows? I mean, with enough altitude, you could recover somewhat, but I don't think airliners tend to recover at all from highly vertical movement.
 

Urwumpe

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If it climbed beyond belief and stalled out, how likely is it that it would have crashed as 'lightly' as the damage shows? I mean, with enough altitude, you could recover somewhat, but I don't think airliners tend to recover at all from highly vertical movement.

It could also climb beyond belief in a strong updraft, those are not impossible and are also dangerous to aircraft. The aircraft could still be in a safe condition and even flying well in normal law then, but once the aircraft leaves the updraft, the situation can get terribly wrong and within seconds, you can be outside the coffin corner. Such updrafts are also very local, it could hit one plane and many others could be just a few kilometers away without noticing anything special.

Hurricane hunters encounter such updrafts very often and are trained in not getting caught on their bad end.
 

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Hurricane hunters encounter such updrafts very often and are trained in not getting caught on their bad end.

Little OT to illustrate your point: It's insane some of the stuff hurricane hunters encounter in their P-3's. For example, I watched some of the recon data on the NHC's site last October as they flew into Category 4 Hurricane Gonzalo and the plane was dramatically changing in altitude as they flew into the eyewall. I'd imagine 180mph (290 km/h) flight level winds would do that though.
 
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Thunder Chicken

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Wreckage was indeed the tail, photographed by divers:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/07/us-indonesia-airplane-idUSKBN0KG09L20150107

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They are hoping the flight recorder is close by.
 

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What depth of water is it in?

Those photos are remarkably clear.
 

Urwumpe

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What depth of water is it in?

Those photos are remarkably clear.

About 24-30 meters in tropical waters - that's very shallow.
 
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