Just checked again - you are correct. Was dawn in the area of last known position at the time of departure, but was daylight an hour later at time plane disappeared.


You can't have it both ways however. Most scenarios which cause sudden loss of communications will cause lots of debris. Conversely, most scenarios that cause minimal debris imply control and hence communications should be maintained.

Sudden loss of all communications could be due to catastrophic structural failure which would cause lots of debris, or an AF447 like event which also caused fragmentation at impact and lots of floating debris. They found lots of debris fairly quickly (days) with AF447 - even though
i. the initial search was delayed by at least a day
ii. the search area was much larger (they didn't "see" loss of the transponder with 447)
iii. the search area was mid-ocean (severely complicating the search by limiting aircraft time on scene and delaying arrival of ships).
None of that applies here.

There simply are not that many explanations for sudden loss of all communications and no debris - especially in a small area.

Singapore, Malaysia, and Australian assets also looking.

If nothing is found today, we will need to contemplate other explanations.

Ranimin:

All good points. "c" was handled occasionally by U.S. airlines by having ground school by the master, Dave Gwinn. Honeywell used Dave after his life at TWA. Unfortunately, Dave died too young.

Beyond that, I have to think of AF447 and the sidestick controls.

MH370 had FIR change. This plane had weather. Both may have served to cause initial confusion. That is the similarity.

How likely is it that a pilot with > 20000 hours flying in equatorial areas suddenly suddenly decided to climb to FL380 due to severe cells?

Dark?

There is more than one kind of "Dark" in aviation in this part of the world. One is when the sun is down. The other is when all cockpit windows are covered by newspapers and blankets while the pilots watch movies or play games on their IPADs.

I have been waiting for this accident to happen. I am only surprised it took so long.

I was trained on weather radar years ago by another master, Archie Trammell. His words ring in my ears decades later as I dodge the CB's.

Of course, next time I take the course I want to raise my hand and ask about those no-seeums in the subtropics. :eek:

Some earlier PPRuNe discussion on WX radar training:

Training and use of airborne weather radar [Archive] - PPRuNe Forums

Malaysian airline ? Indonesian registration
 

McNugget

50 years of ongoing, simmering animosity at many levels would probably rule out any such merger.
For any who may not have noticed, the airline is Air Asia Indonesia and the registration is PK = Indonesia.

What is your definition of a "small area"?

Given a good starting position (e.g., last contact position) SAR computes an initial search area given parameters like flight altitude, cruising speed, prevailing winds, sea surface and underwater currents, etc.

In this case, the initial search area is 120nm by 240nm (28,800 square miles) divided into four sectors.

According to Indonesian media, after reaching the area yesterday, SAR assets were only able to do a preliminary search covering maybe 50 square miles out of this 28,800. A whopping 0.17% coverage!

And today they have decided to expand the initial search area by a further 3 sectors, covering not only waters north and east of Belitung Island, but also land over western Borneo.

Slats11

Not very likely in my opinion.

Airlines today in that part of the world are looking for young, therefore likely inexperienced overall, male model looking types and highly educated. More emphasis is placed on stringent medical standards than experience. Nothing too much wrong with that but the real important stuff cannot be learnt in a class room. In my day there was no real substitute for experience and hand flying practice was encouraged (in the right environment, of course.) Not now it ain't, with RVSM etc. I have always maintained, if you can fly an a/c S&L at altitude accurately, then you can do most things you need to do with the aircraft accurately also. It also taught us not to be scared to take over manually if we didn't like the behavior of the A/P for example.

No none of us are perfect of course but these days I don't think the risk management is managed as well as it should be managed. Just my 2 cents worth.

Vastly smaller than the search area for MH370, where they found nothing.

And significantly smaller than the search area for AF447 where they found lots of stuff fairly quickly - despite the delay initiating search and despite the search area being mid-ocean.

If nothing is found, there will come a point when that has to be considered suspicious rather than normal.

It took 8 days to find the wreckage of Adam Air 574, so it is a while yet before conspiracy theories warrant airing!

Last known radar return, was roughly 120NM from closest publically known radar site.

If it had PSR at that range you would get some returns but not for long if descending

For SSR It's likely around 15,000 you would start to lose the ability to "see" any SSR returns

Once again sketchy information

I want to know what altitude for certain was last received on radar.

Was this aircraft ADS-B certainly?

The TEST1 radar is I think shown as T-EST1, and as far as I know it's actually just an ESTimated (by FR24) position, not an actual receiver. Also, those radar identifiers on FR24 are just to tell you the closest airport to the receiver being used as the source, it doesn't indicate any other connection with the airport or any ATC radar network.

airbubba

I took the archie trammel course too. GREAT WX RADAR expert and teacher.

It changed the way I used radar and if you ain't futzin with it, you aren't gettin' th ewhole picture.

tilt, tilt, gain whatever

you play with it to get a good picture.

sadly I am thinking: RADAR SHADOW/precip radar attenuation. enter, upset, mishandle recovery, boom

oh well.

Experts:ugh:

With experts like this who needs conspiracy theorists.

Yes they will activate on contact with water, if not malfunctioning. But no they don't transmit very well from under water, Something about electromagnetic waves and mediums. Hence you have an acoustic beacon.

Search areas.

From altitude by the time they hit the floor, can give a large search area. Just reinforces how hard it can be to sea search, especially if the weather is sh!t. Depending on impact pattern and type of break up, it may not be conducive to finding.

Satellites and real time.

We can go for the rolls royce system or basic reporting position system.
Yes almost every thing is possible with money. But to what end and what purpose? Most resources goes into prevention. We already have an onboard system that these days can tell almost as much as you want.

Most of what your asking for is not prevention, its convenience, in the odd case of never finding the BB such as MH370 or their damaged, yes real time would be the go. But that requires money.

In this case they think they know where it is, and still can't find it yet, I don't think a real time position report would help if that was the case. If it turns out it is significantly away from where they think it is, then yes it may do.

Communications

Aviate, navigate Communicate.

As my old flying instructor used to say, Fly the F#$% airplane first, instead of trying flap ones trap. If things turned to Sh!t, they may be too busy trying to save themselves and every one else's @rse to boldly announce to the world they are going down.

Indonesia SAR
 

"It took 8 days to find the wreckage of Adam Air 574, so it is a while yet before conspiracy theories warrant airing!"

Actually the metal objects which they located after 8 days were never identified ,but thought to be instruments which had been deployed to study ocean currents.
The first confirmed wreckage was after 11 days, when a fisherman found the starboard horizontal stabilizer.
I sincerely hope that we are not witnessing the start of another debacle like the Adam Air 574 SAR and investigation/report.

Of course, for all the loss of comms/no comms conspiracy crowd I can assure you that if indeed this aircraft hit severe/extreme turbulence it is almost impossible to use the radios. I've hit severe turbulence three times (all clear air) and neither I nor my colleague could even get our radio fingers on the PTT buttons to request a rapid descent... Nor could we even see the PFDs clearly!

Perhaps something more than severe

I've taken probably over 100 severe turbulence reports, in all instances the crews were able to communicate.

AirAsia Flight QZ8501: Search for missing plane resumes

If true, puts the crash site further north/west than previously thought (but almost bang on the unconfirmed Belitung Island (Tanjung Pandan shoreline) wreckage reports.)

Question:
 

Hi everyone,

I probably should know the answer to this, but how many modern airliners in cruise flight were brought down by catastrophic structural failure after encountering severe weather? And let's exclude accidents where the plane had a previously diagnosed or undiagnosed mechanical problem that contributed to it (you can argue a few weather accidents on those grounds).

Yes, most pilots avoid them. But I can only think of stalls, hail damage, etc, while in cruise, and none where the plane blew apart enough where it was uncontrollable. And uncontrollable to the point where the pilots didn't have time to contact ATC. Here it was over in a matter of minutes.

Not sure if I've heard of a modern airliner with radar and significant over-engineering just catastrophically failing in weather. Not talking about a private pilot who "inadvertently" wanders into a thunderstorm out of stupidity.

Just curious. Seems these planes venture into these situations commonly, doing their best to avoid if at all possible. These pilots were obviously briefed on the weather to expect enroute.

Was wondering. Not that it matters, but I'm still in the purely speculative out-of-envelope stall in horrendous weather, whether or not it was precipitated by some other distraction (such as pitot tube icing deja vu).

This pilot obviously had serious skills (20k+ hours?!) in this part of the world.

I honestly can only think of that semi-modern Mt. Fuji encounter (previously mentioned) that were beyond the plane's limits. But my memory is fading quickly as I age, and those accidents I investigated in the past are slipping my mind!

Just trying to gain some facts from experts with things being so speculative at this point.

Thank you everyone!

I've taken plenty of turbulence reports too - mostly pilots say "moderate to severe" though. I did take one (just one) report of "extreme" CAT but that was preceded by the three magic words. They did come through it OK.


However, I agree with the pilots here who are saying that talking to ATC is definitely a low priority if clickers horns or synthetic voices are sounding. If an aircraft crashes without a distress call it doesn't prove much other than that the crew had their hands full trying to save it.