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denverpilot

denverpilot

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DenverPilot
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Missing aircraft over the Java Sea. Ugh.

Just saw some babble on CNN World in the hotel room.
 
I'm thinking that flying commercial airlines in Malaysia may not be a good idea.
 
They're not being real clear if they lost it or just lost it on the scopes.

Reports say they requested an 'unusual' flight route before disappearing.

I don't know what unusual in this context means, maybe the big iron boys here will shed some light.
 
CNN is focusing on weather in the area.

Towering Cu to 50k+; they're assuming just a deviation around one.
 
denverpilot said:
Towering Cu to 50k+
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Probably he zigged when he should have zagged or considered a 180. Sad. News I read said he was at FL320 requesting FL380 but had not been cleared yet.
 
One of my friend's sister is to fly to Malasia at the begging of the year for mission work. Needless to say her family is not very excited. I almost hope they haven't heard about this uet.
 
I've got a trip to Singapore in a couple weeks. Glad it's not on a Malaysian flagged carrier. This has not been a good year for them.
 
Latest Australian radar returns show them going thru level 363 about 105 knots too slow to sustain flight. Weather shows they were likely maneuvering to avoid thunderstorms in the area.

Pretty good chance they might of had one of their probes ice up. Read the following account of a Lufthansa A-321 that occurred just last month :

"By Simon Hradecky, created Tuesday, Nov 18th 2014 17:11Z, last updated Sunday, Dec 28th 2014 22:22Z
A Lufthansa Airbus A321-200, registration D-AIDP performing flight LH-1829 from Bilbao,SP (Spain) to Munich (Germany) with 109 people on board, was climbing through FL310 out of Bilbao about 15 minutes into the flight at 07:03Z, when the aircraft on autopilot unexpectedly lowered the nose and entered a descent reaching 4000 fpm rate of descent. The flight crew was able to stop the descent at FL270 and continued the flight at FL270, later climbing to FL280, and landed safely in Munich about 110 minutes after the occurrence.

The French BEA reported in their weekly bulletin that the occurrence was rated a serious incident and is being investigated by Germany's BFU.

The occurrence aircraft remained on the ground in Munich for 75 hours before resuming service on Nov 8th.

The Aviation Herald learned that the loss of altitude had been caused by two angle of attack sensors having frozen in their positions during climb at an angle, that caused the fly by wire protection to assume, the aircraft entered a stall while it climbed through FL310. The Alpha Protection activated forcing the aircraft to pitch down, which could not be corrected even by full back stick input. The crew eventually disconnected the related Air Data Units and was able to recover the aircraft."
 
Airbus' fly by wire "protections" are looking less appealing as time goes on.
 
I find it interesting that after 2 days of searching in a heavily traveled area, where the plane was lost on radar, they have found nothing.

Didn't we find scraps of TWA 800 at dawn the next day? I believe they found pieces of AF447 after what, 3 days, and that was a much, much, larger search area (and not on radar at the time).
 
TWA800 was never missing or lost. There were private vessels and local rescue teams on the scene immediately. It was pretty easy to find given that the ocean was on fire. It was only about 12 miles off shore, and a thousand people saw it happen (I was one of them).

Ocean's are big and planes sink. Foul weather makes everything sink faster and spreads it out everywhere. Finding an obvious floating pile of rubble after crashing in a storm in open ocean is pretty unlikely. At least this time we can be fairly certain we looking in the right hemisphere....

I'd love to know what the transponder and/or ADS-B altitude was indicating through the "disappearance sequence". I doubt it went from 320 to 0 between sweeps.
 
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They've found the fuselage, broken into several pieces, on the ocean floor. Along with debris fields and bodies. The bulk of it is in the general vicinity of the last radar contact. Not that there is anything good about this. But at least the families of this one can get some closure and the investigation and quickly proceed.
 
May they rest in peace,hopefully they recover the recorders,to help solve the mystery.
 
The tail probably broke off. Just like the one in New York 12 years ago. Then they can erroneously blame the pilots again.
 
Seeing the weather conditions posted on the Aviation Herald and inflight breakup wouldn't surprise me.
 
Anyone heard what water depth they are finding the fuselage in?
News reports divers to the site and Java Sea is relatively shallow.
 
Jay Honeck said:
I'm thinking that flying commercial airlines in Malaysia may not be a good idea.
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That part of the world has continuous severe storms and volcanic activity. You will not be flying GA in and out of Indonesia because the opportunity does not exist. The only way the boss had his plane there was to put it under contract with a charter operator. Since the only other way to get around in the area is on a ferry which go down considerably more frequently than airlines do, commercial airliners are still the best bet.
 
Norman said:
Seeing the weather conditions posted on the Aviation Herald and inflight breakup wouldn't surprise me.
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That is one mean area of the globe to operate in, the intertropical convergence zone.

I've flown back and forth into Jakarta over the Java Sea and Borneo. One of the things that I always noticed is I would request large deviations around storms (up to 100 miles) while the locals would just try to minimize deviations and pick their way through.

In the Western world we learned 30+ years ago to use weather radar to avoid thunderstorms. Our friends in Asia would rather use the radar to try to penetrate a line of storms.
 
I don't think "the fuselage" has been located anywhere. Those reports were false. They've located numerous different possible pieces of it on sonar. They don't have their hands on any of it.
 
N5922S said:
Over the weekend, CNN had on an "aviation expert" who made multiple references to "pilot tubes". :mad2:
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I watched Anderson Cooper on the flight back to Fort Lauderdale yesterday for about 5 minutes before I got so annoyed with the coverage I had to turn it off after 5 minutes. He kept focussing that they didn't have permission to make the flight, like the permission issue (a matter of how many seats they were allowed per month, purely a business issue, not safety) was what brought the plane down. Yep Anderson, planes fall out of the sky if they don't have permission.:mad2::mad2::mad2:

I used to fly a Chieftain that had a 'pilot tube', I like using a Gatorade jug better.:rofl:

This accident is an issue of poor decision making around heavy weather in an area that has some of the heaviest weather in the world. These are the storms that drive our "Arctic Zephyrs".
 
Henning said:
planes fall out of the sky if they don't have permission.:mad2::mad2::mad2:

No, no, no. They fall out of the sky because they didn't file a flight plan. Just ask any reporterette or county sheriff.
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I saw a report this morning that they 'found the tail'. I hope that's true, because in most airplanes that's where the FDR and CVR are located.
 
JimNtexas said:
I saw a report this morning that they 'found the tail'. I hope that's true, because in most airplanes that's where the FDR and CVR are located.
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I think in that plane the FDR is aft and CVR forward.
 
If it was an A320 they are both in the same location just forward of the horizontal stab on the right side (at least on ours they are)
 
They found at least part of the tail, about 15ft x 6ft. It's on sonar, confirmed by ROV camera. They do not have anything on the pinger locator for the FDR/CVR.
 
I didn't think it was going to take this long, maybe a day or two. I'm just curious as to find out what happened.
 
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