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Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore

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Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore

Old 12th Jan 2015, 13:44
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Answer to mm43 - FDR and CVR coordinates

3°37'20.7"S 109°42'43"E --------- acc.to A0283’s plot, new object, so probable CVR,
3°37'21.13"S 109°42'42.45"E -----acc.to A0283’s plot, coordinates published for FDR,

offical, previously stated FDR coordinates were:

3°37'21"S109°42'42"E

but they are 21.7 meters apart.

offical,previously stated distance estimate 20m,

A0283 addition - Taking mm43's 21.7 meters. And the offical statement that the
FDR was stuck under 'the' wing. CVR appears to be too. If we take a wingspan value
of 35.80 meters ... An 'intact' wing could easily cover both locations.

Last edited by A0283; 12th Jan 2015 at 14:03. Reason: Add wingspan
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 13:44
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Picture from Antara News:



This appears to be an L-3 Aviation FA2100 Solid-State FDR.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 13:45
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Originally Posted by matkat
Stu/Blake if the seat was from the cockpit it may well be the engineer previously mentioned and manifested.
I believe the engineer's body has been recovered (based on the obituary postings on FB from those who knew him). And engineers who accompany flights which is common in Indonesia normally sit in the cabin (something to do with cockpit authority gradient) and usually at the back or emergency exit row if not taken by a passenger who has paid more for the extra legroom.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 13:54
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@TWheels

..engineers...normally sit in the cabin (something to do with cockpit authority gradient)..
Your sure of this are you.....less to do with SOP??
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 14:36
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Debris recovery, media, 'explosion', 3km

peekay: "No professional investigator or materials engineer would be confused by scrapes or scratches from the recovery effort."

I don't know if I would go that far, but the recovery crew needs to be cut some slack. My first reaction on the winch-aboard' was 'they're squashing it'. But the "tail" was more like a paper bag ripped open than an airplane, with one heavy, rigid piece (v stab) still attached. The 3D structural strength of the tail portion below water was insufficient out of water. The entire section would have required a redundant structure built around it to maintain the section's shape. The subsurface work would have to be performed over days with little visibility in what amounts to a cyclone of current flow. And there are more pieces waiting to be recovered.

News media so far is reinforcing the observation that there is nothing it can be told that it cannot screw up, misinterpret, take to the most illogical extreme, ignore language differences, fail to ask for clarification, or let die as inaccurate. We can be sure that every blind alley and patently false notion will be given equal, or sometimes even more earnest, concerned emphasis than clear statements of fact. We can further anticipate the errors, misinterpretations etc etc etc will be repeated and repeated and repeated by photogenic but otherwise clueless talking heads, referencing one another and welcoming false prophets and experts chosen for their dialectic positions until falsehoods approach the refined virtual news reality which is where news viewers are expected to function and like it. The statement of 'explosion by air pressure' is interesting, but has already been grabbed by media and morphed into Frankenstein. Pprune is a place supposedly sheltered from such media fallout but is not immune to it.

3km between FDR/CVR and tail section is a significant distance on smooth paving, and farther on water. We are lacking the early stages of a debris field map, overlays of current, and updates. Hopefully they will begin appearing.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 14:56
  #1846 (permalink)  
 
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I think 3km is a lot I'm sure a 6kt current can't move 20kilos of metal that's sat in the sand
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 15:07
  #1847 (permalink)  
 
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@Livesinafield: "I think 3km is a lot I'm sure a 6kt current can't move 20kilos of metal that's sat in the sand"

At 6kt that distance represents about 20 minutes - if one of two pieces sinks straight away after surface impact and disruption, and the other floats for 20 minutes before sinking carried by a current flowing at that speed, that does not seem particularly unrealistic?
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 15:08
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I would not bet on that. Diver and sailor here - the amount of force 6 knots of current exerts on a large and light metal object is immense.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 15:30
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Modern airborne radar is better than the "crap" we had 30 years ago? Surely you jest.

I could see the control tower on an airport from 5 miles out with the old radars, I could see individual airplanes parked on the ramp. I could see the weather clearly and make my own decisions as to the amount of water carried by parts of the cloud and thus make my own decision as to the parts to avoid. I flew years and years in the tropics and experienced hundreds of severe encounters at some of the worst levels (around 13,000 to 15,000 feet).

I give you the new radars are easy to use and they do the deciphering for you, but often they are wrong and always exaggerate. They are useless for fine work, cannot do even a small part of what was done by the older radars. They are cheaper to buy and to maintain, and are much lighter, so I see the reason for them, but don't kid yourself that they are better for the purpose they were built.
No Boofhead, I do not jest. They were crap.
I cut my ITCZ teeth on B732's in West Africa in the early 80's. My prevailing memory of those old radars was dodgy unreliable displays, lots of twiddly knobs to play with, and the definite impressioin that half the time they were serving you BS. Maybe because my crusty old Captains weren't 'adept' enough at twiddling the knobs. Or maybe because it was a black art that required a lot of concentration to work right - the kind of time you don't always have when racing around at 500mph in a storm filled sky.

Indeed a pair of my colleagues were almost killed by one of those cranky boxes. They made the mistake of interpreting a gap in the display as a hole. It was in fact a 'Super Cell', blanked out by radar attenuation. The aircraft was almost a write-off. The damage was impressive.

C Band Radar requires larger antennae, and other heavier equipment (so I'm told) so other solutions would be developed by necessity. The new radars do not require anything like the artistry of the old systems to give you useful info. When you say 'pilots don't know how to read/operate their radar' and instead recommend a return to those prehistoric glow tubes of old - you are being a bit of a luddite, nothing more. There is every likelihood such a system would create more problems than solutions. So I'll keep my modern, stabilised, bright, colour contoured, computer enhanced, map overlaid MODERN Wx radar thanks. If you want you can always switch off the automatics and play away to your hearts content with the raw data, ground clutter, noise, and all the other rubbish.

The bottom line is - the new stuff shows the weather very well in my experience. You use it to avoid - not penetrate CB's. Doing otherwise is the only possible explanation I can come up with for your love of those old boxes.
Good luck.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 15:44
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All or most of the pax will have died from the same cause, so a few autopsies should be enough.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 15:47
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Are you sure the super-cell would not be black on a new radar too? Very early on with the monochrome digital radar we had back in the day, we learne the black blobs in the middle of the green returns were the worst areas to fly, not holes in the storms. The physics of extreme rain absorbing the radio waves has not changed.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:00
  #1852 (permalink)  
 
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Correct.
Also with modern radar, any black area surrounded by Red is to be acoided at all times as this is probably an area where the data is invalid due to much precipitation...

On some models, this is supposed to be depected by magenta, not on the radars I operate though.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:03
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Large ships and some boats will fit S band radar that can burn through heavy rain, but the antennas would never fit anything but an AWACS airplane.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:03
  #1854 (permalink)  
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Originally Posted by sAx_R54
@TWheels

Your sure of this are you.....less to do with SOP??
The airline I worked for in Indonesia welcome the engineer to sit in the jumpseat, but if they weren't required to be there to troubleshoot a problem, then they usually chose to sit in the cabin unless, of course, when we were full and they had no choice. On such occasions, I got the impression they felt uneasy being in the cockpit, which I suspect is due to the authority gradient.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:11
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3km, explosive

Tail section carried 3km is believable only if the tail was down current from the FDR. When we see current direction overlaid on a map of FDR and tail section locations it will be clear enough. Or more puzzling if the tail was cross stream or upstream.

I don't know anyone who does not with hindsight regret their choice of words from time to time, especially when in front of a crowd or on camera. I don't yet see anything contradictory in the 'explosive..air pressure' statement'. Sounds may be mis-interpreted, so must be considered separately. But a high volume, high velocity intrusion of seawater midpoint into a mostly horizontal fuselage could be expected to result in some cabin air overpressure. The paper bag analogy remains viable. Do recall also the fuselage frame pic of the skin neatly unzipped from the intact frame. The most likely cause of that is a sudden, very large, very uniform internal pressure. One must come up with an alternate cause for the unzipped skins to be able to disregard a fuselage overpressure. The video of the fuselage in situ which also shows virtually all cabin contents absent suggests a significant force having removed them.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:19
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Originally Posted by despegue
Correct.
Also with modern radar, any black area surrounded by Red is to be acoided at all times as this is probably an area where the data is invalid due to much precipitation...

On some models, this is supposed to be depected by magenta, not on the radars I operate though.
And remember that these radars regardless of their age are showing the rain which is mainly in the cold downdrafts. Warm updrafts will show a lot weaker on the radar but the turbulence will be as bad as the rainy downdraft and sudden changes in OAT can confuse the ADIRUs.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:27
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Do any airliners fit stormscopes or equivalent technology? One of their selling points was that lightning was found in turbulent air, heavy rain or not. I liked the one I had way back when. Not as accurate as radar, but it worked.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:34
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Reading FDR

Numerous news reports about the recovery of QZ8501's flight data recorder say it might take up to a month to read the data. Can anyone tell me if this is true and why it takes so long, especially if the FDR is intact, as this one seems to be?
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:46
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No professional investigator or materials engineer would be confused by scrapes or scratches from the recovery effort.
As a professional aviation investigator and materials engineer I concur with peekay4's comment.

Moreover, I think it is important to not overplay the significance of the airframe impact damage. Think about what happens when an aircraft impacts land rather than water. Events X, Y and Z occur at altitude, leading to aircraft loss with ground impact. There will often be massive deformation, tearing and even burning of the airframe as a result of the ground impact. For the most part there is not a lot of significance that can be attributed to the somewhat random large-scale airframe damage caused by ground impact, other than determining things such as approximate speed, attitude and angle at impact (I'm in no way saying that impact damage and ground witness marks are unimportant, just that for the most part these are a consequence of a chain of preceding events that are often more significant to the investigation). Despite extensive ground impact damage, the evidence of what occurred is still there to be found, and far more often than not the factors leading up to the accident will be determined by the investigation team.

It is not easy hauling damaged airframes out of water without causing additional deformation and damage. My point is that some salvage-induced damage is not likely to be a big deal w.r.t. determining what happened with this flight.
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Old 12th Jan 2015, 16:49
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island airphoto,
I can remember being struck by lightning in a clear blue sky when flying out of Tel Aviv - no turbulence and not a cloud in the sky! Lightning in thunderstorm is not associated with turbulence in the same that way that water droplets are.
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