JamesGV: YES! Please enlighten us, from the top of your private flying experience! Please show us how to "get this conversation back on track"!:ugh:

With all due respect...

Suffice it to say, this was a very professional search done competently by the relevant authorities.

TCAS and ADS-B.

er...

See above.

But another private flyer has been deleted.

Seriously, is this conversation about the accident and how to avoid such ?

EVS and FLIR

When I started out it was common to have a total of 25,000 hours plus of experience in the flight deck.

I wonder what the average experience is in the modern flight deck?

Whilst experience doesn't necessarily relate to competence, there must be some correlation.

It is appreciated that a man may have 25 years' experience rather than 1 years' experience 25 times, but the question in modern air travel still remains - airlines in their rush to expand and reduce cost put relatively inexperienced crews, with minimum training and real experience, in advanced aircraft in all weathers Worldwide.

AirAsia pilot was "one of the best":

AirAsia pilot one of military academy?s best graduates | The Jakarta Post

Aviation Quote...


There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime.

Cost maybe ?

By that I mean, the PIC is not to blame here (nor the F/O). His (their) constraints maybe are.

At some point people must "wake up and smell the coffee".
Cheap airline travel does not exist without limitations.
NOR DOES the fact you can't find a downed a/c in 2 hours ! It's "real life". You just can't do it.

Maybe it's "the internet" to blame. Instant "stuff" online, when you need it, right now !
But....within three days. All credit to the Indonesian SAR teams. They did really well I believe.

It is highly probable that neither QZ8501, nor AF447 for that matter, would have crashed if they had taken steps to avoid the thunderstorm cells on their chosen routes. In both cases, and before they took off, they must have been aware of the severe storm cells they were likely to encounter en-route. Creating a flight plan which avoids an aircraft entering a hazardous situation should be the crew's/airline's first priority. Introducing an exception clause to aircraft insurance policies that would invalidate hull cover should an airline/crew fail to take reasonable steps to stay clear of thunderstorms, might be a first step. It might force a more cautious approach at the flight planning stage on routes where severe weather can be expected. Also, to ensure their actions would be (in hindsight) considered "reasonable", crews might feel more ready to undertake costly detours or diversions to avoid dangerous weather systems.


Avoiding getting into a hazardous situations trumps flight deck heroics every time! Even my car insurance stipulates my cover will be invalidated if I fail to take reasonable care to avoid hazardous situations.

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the report of AF447 said the aircraft did not enter a thunderstorm?

And we don't know whether this flight did so yet.

Is there conclusive proof at this moment in time that the aircraft went thought a CB ? NO

Is there conclusive proof that lack of experience has played a part. ? NO

to fireflybob Hi: Please look around the net an see for yourself the MONSTER line of thunderstorms that where present in the flightpath of that AF accident. There was a line of thunderstorms hundreds of mile long and wide enough to have caused a lot of problems.

I am not a pilot. I am a software/systems engineer by trade with a strong interest in aerodynamics. My point here is to discuss cockpit design issues and how they may have contributed. While this is Airbus specific, there is significant overlap with Boeing and so I am not trying to start a Boeing/Airbus flame war.

One thing that strikes me about this incident is that there are a number of immediate similarities to AF447. The plane climbs, appears to lose at least ground speed, may have stalled and subsequently crashed. If course without FDR/CVR we don't know exactly what happened so this is just speculation.

Yes, AF447 was proximally pilot error. But errors occur in contexts and one of the important areas that was also covered in the report and discussed in IEEE publications was the role of what is called the automation paradox, namely that the more reliable the automation system in place, the less a human can contribute to the success of the system when something goes wrong. One serious issue is that heavy automation in aircraft may make pilot error inevitable. That has some significant implications as we look at assigning blame for this accident, AF447, and the like. IEEE Spectrum had an article that is easily accessible to non-techies called "Automated To Death". I would recommend reading it. There has been some more AF447-specific coverage as well in Spectrum and other publications, and the fact is that the final report did discuss how the error reporting obscured the cause of the problems and contributed to pilot error.

Automation is a funny thing. There's a saying, that computers make it possible to make more mistakes faster than any invention since handguns and hard liquor. Unfortunately just because you put a person in charge, that problem doesn't go away. And when you add the fact that Airbus sidesticks do not provide significant feedback to the other side, you have a situation where things can be more difficult to recover from than they should.

In my view early indications point to pilot disorientation coupled with bad weather, turbulence, etc leading to a stall. Given the heavy automation in the systems, the question is, how does being suddenly thrown into a situation where the automation *isn't* working as expected and where you have to rapidly figure out both the technical and human elements of it, something which makes these sorts of mistakes more likely than they should be? Now throw the pilot into a situation where the automation isn't working as expected and weather is bad, and you have a real recipe for disaster. The question we should be trying to figure out is how we rethink the interface between pilot and avionics to minimize these issues. That's not as trivial as who has final authority, but it has to go into everything. On this I don't have immediate answers. it is however a field of on-going research. I don't think though that this issue can be left to computer scientists, aerospace engineers and the like. I think we need to be looking at getting a lot of pilot feedback as well.

In the end I think one has to be careful in assuming that if pilot error was the proximal cause (AF447) that this is where we place the blame. This case is shaping up to look eerily similar.

I do wonder though whether, as taboo as the subject is, if it is even possible to make much greater gains in safety automation without bringing back the flight engineer albeit in modified form. Yes, this has been marketed as reducing staff by eliminating this role. So yes there is a money vs further risk mitigation issue that comes into play (and it may not be worth it). But you can't just throw pilots into the role of troubleshooting a complex automated solution and expect that they will filter things out always correctly.

TL;DR: I am wondering what the role of automation was in any crew confusion and pilot error that resulted here was. I think it is likely that, as with AF447, that this interplay will prove important.

There are conventions used in the measurement of weather radar reflectivity...
Quote...
When describing weather radar returns, pilots, dispatchers, and air traffic controllers will typically refer to three return levels:[20]

• level 1 corresponds to a green radar return, indicating usually light precipitation and little to no turbulence, leading to a possibility of reduced visibility.
• level 2 corresponds to a yellow radar return, indicating moderate precipitation, leading to the possibility of very low visibility, moderate turbulence and an uncomfortable ride for aircraft passengers.
• level 3 corresponds to a red radar return, indicating heavy precipitation, leading to the possibility of thunderstorms and severe turbulence and structural damage to the aircraft.

Aircraft will try to avoid level 2 returns when possible, and will always avoid level 3 unless they are specially-designed research aircraft.


This flight and flight-plan took the aircraft through Yellow and Red areas on the weather radar plot, and contact was lost as it approached the second red area, almost to within a mile.
Those are the known facts...

Crash: Indonesia Asia A320 over Java Sea on Dec 28th 2014, aircraft lost height and impacted waters

fireflybob

Try this page for weather info.

Air France 447 - AFR447 - A detailed meteorological analysis - Satellite and weather data

:)
With due respect. only post in the areas you know something about .

Cloudtoper :
Best post so far .:D

Anyone else see similarities with the Swiftair MD83 crash last July flying through the ITCZ and crashing after a speed decay in Northern Mali I believe?

Agreed but if that point can be reached, surely there must be some 'emergency red button' which just disables all automation and "hands back manual control" from whatever law or state the system is currently in/resets all warnings.

Of course, hardware does go wrong/gets frozen. Would a big red button have helped AF447? Maybe and maybe not. I guess we could find ourselves in an argument about whether pitot tubes are fit for purpose? :ugh:

QZ8501
 

Air Asia continues using QZ8501 flight number

Flightradar24.com - Live flight tracker!

2014-12-29
Surabaya (SUB) Singapore (SIN) A320 (PK-AXU) 05:20 AM WIB 05:42 AM 08:30 AM SGT Landed 08:35 AM
2014-12-28
Surabaya (SUB) Singapore (SIN) A320 (PK-AXC) 05:20 AM WIB 05:35 AM 08:30 AM SGT Unknown
2014-12-26
Surabaya (SUB) Singapore (SIN) A320 (PK-AXI) 05:20 AM WIB 05:30 AM 08:30 AM SGT Landed 08:27 AM
2014-12-24
Surabaya (SUB) Singapore (SIN) A320 (PK-AXW) 05:20 AM WIB 05:38 AM 08:30 AM SGT Landed 08:31 AM

That misunderstands the nature of the problem. Yes you can effectively get back some degree of manual control. But you get in a problematic situation, in an instrument flying scenario, and you have an automation system that is giving you tons of warnings, it is far harder to see what is wrong so you can take corrective action.

Think of it this way: For unsophisticated automation, you go a little from expected and you hand to the human while things are still a ways from critical, and the human can react and correct it. For sophisticated automation you do a better and better job until when you hand it to the human, the human has to be super-human in terms of filtering out what information is relevant in order to recover.

For example, suppose you get a stick-shaker and an overspeed warning at the same time. Which do you follow? If you have thought about it ahead of time, maybe you know that the stick-shaker should take precedence. But now imagine you have 5-10 errors and you need to figure out which ones you need to focus on, and you have to do so quickly, having just made a major context switch.

So it goes way beyond "just hand control back to the human." That's what AF447 effectively did, but with all the warnings, that didn't do the humans much good.

As usual on this forum, things can get off-track easily. I just logged on and tried to get caught up on the thread. But I found myself reading posts about the Air France accident, in-depth discussions about electronic tracking capabilities, systems that should or should not be turned off by the crew, and radar return levels that are OK to fly through.

So far, as always at this point, we know very little about this accident. As others have said, PRESUMING that this is weather related, I would be interested to know about the Captain's airline PIC and weather flying experience, especially since the he reportedly requested a climb.

Rarely is it a good idea (in a transport aircraft, anyway) to try to out-climb and overfly a thunderstorm. I would be interested in knowing how heavy he was at the point he requested a climb, and what was his maximum altitude for moderate turbulence based upon that weight.

Nor is it a good idea to try and penetrate a thunderstorm at night on radar.

Also, was there traffic ahead going the same way, and what were they doing to avoid the thunderstorm(s) ahead of him?

If he needed a heading change to safely skirt the cell, why didn't he simply declare an emergency and turn a safe distance off course when the clearance wasn't forthcoming?

Sorry if these things have been previously covered, but I got lost in discussions of wide body vs. narrow body differences in engine parameter transmission capabilities :)

Or a Blue Button, like some Garmin avionics have, which automagically returns the airplane to straight-and-level when pushed, no matter its attitude.

Altitude permitting, of course...

Latest on ABC - Oz
 

ABC Oz news:

AirAsia QZ8501: Multiple bodies, wreckage recovered in search for missing plane

Updated about an hour agoWed 31 Dec 2014, 7:06am
http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/599...x2-340x227.jpg

Photo: Members of the Indonesian air force show items retrieved from the Java sea during search and rescue operations for the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501. (AFP: Bay Ismoyo)
Related Story: US warship to join search for missing AirAsia aircraft
Map: Indonesia

An Indonesian warship has recovered three bodies from the sea in the search for the AirAsia jet, Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency says.
Earlier in the day, a navy spokesman told the media a warship had retrieved more than 40 bodies but later retracted the statement saying it was a miscommunication by staff.
Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency chief Bambang Soelistyon said: "Today we evacuated three bodies and they are now in the warship Bung Tomo".
An Indonesian air force plane spotted items resembling an emergency slide, plane door and other objects in the search for missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 earlier in the day.
AirAsia has released a statement confirming the debris found is from flight QZ8501.
Indonesian president Joko Widodo said all available ships and helicopters would be deployed to the area where the debris was found.
He urged the families of the passengers and crew to "be strong as they faced this difficult moment".

Red and white debris spotted

Earlier, authorities gave media an update in which they showed a video of a body floating in the Java Sea.
"Based on the observation by search and rescue personnel, significant things have been found such as a passenger door and cargo door," Djoko Murjatmodjo, director general of air transportation at the transportation ministry, said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/599...x2-340x227.jpg

Photo: Items spotted in the Java Sea during the search for AirAsia QZ8501. (AFP: Bay Ismoyo)

"It's in the sea, 160 kilometres south-west of Pangkalan Bun," he said, referring to the town in Central Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.
He said aircraft searching for the missing aircraft had sighted "red and white-coloured" debris off the coast of Kalimantan.
Eleven divers were sent to the site and will search in an area of water about 25-30 metres deep.
There was no word on the possibility of any survivors and the plane has not been found, althoughIndonesian authorities have spotted a shadow under the water they believed was the aircraft.
Pictures of floating bodies were broadcast on television and relatives of the missing gathered at a crisis centre in Surabaya.
Several people collapsed in grief and were helped away, a Reuters reporter said.
"You have to be strong," the mayor of Surabaya, Tri Rismaharini, said as she comforted relatives.
"They are not ours, they belong to God."
A navy spokesman said a plane door, oxygen tanks and one body had been recovered and taken away by helicopter for tests.

First of all, if you are not an Airbus pilot you are unfortunately completely unqualified to draw too many conclusions from this tragic accident. If you are an Airbus pilot, you will know how little you know at this point, and are probably wisely remaining silent. Airbus pilots, and particularly those from the training community, will know the potential issues, but until the CVR and FDR have been recovered will say very little indeed.

My only input to my fellow professionals would be to note that this thread is being read by concerned members of the public, including those who are devastated at the loss of their loved ones and who are desperate for answers. Uninformed conjecture can only lead to further agony for them, and we must therefore be extremely cautious in offering opinions without a basis in fact. The thread is also read by journalists and media professionals who are desperate for a 'scoop' and the inside track no one else has. These people will gladly publish half truths and partial information that do no favours to anyone. I would thus encourage enormous self-discipline and the wisdom to remain silent until more is known.

hull break up in air
 

I write emergency plans for transport disasters and conduct response exercises and analysis, and have worked with transport companies and authorities on terminal events. I am not a pilot or other aircrew.

The chilling images of bodies minus clothing and with limbs intact seems to indicate structural break up in the air at height (as in Lockerbie).

Standard forensic experience is that the decay process in a corpse will create enough gas in internal organs to overcome the normal natural negative buoyancy after about three days, depending mainly on water temperature. This, sadly, appears to be in line with today's discoveries, and the recovery and identification of bodies is a small comfort of importance to victims' families. Spare a thought for the recovery crews in their line of duty.

Does anyone know if this AirAsia Airbus had Thales pitot tubes that were scheduled to be replaced by Goodrich pitot tubes? I believe Air France had been replacing these. Just wondering; it's my understanding, per the final Air France 447 BEA report (Page 198), that pitot tubes played a part in the crash of this aircraft:

. . . and, an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article published 12/28/14:

The link to the BEA Final Air France 447 report is: http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp...p090601.en.pdf

The link to the WSJ article is: Missing AirAsia Flight Stirs Old Debates Over Safety - WSJ (You may not be able to read the entire WSJ article, since they like to try and "encourage" you to subscribe to their online editions. Therefore, I included the relevant paragraph information.)

My apologies if this has been discussed on this thread before. I tried searching for it, but couldn't find it.

A slightly more explicit response than PeeKay4 :)

TCAS will give information on aircraft that are potential threats to the safety of your aircraft. The picture is somewhat distorted but the algorithms for alerting are excellent.

ADS-B (In) is the ability for an aircraft to receive and display the ADS-B transmissions of other aircraft. This is displayed in the cockpit on a display rather obviously called a Cockpit Display of Traffic Information (CDTI). This is a GPS map type display with the other aircraft shown on it with the ADS-B information that is available. CDTI is common in many small GA aircraft but airline operators are less keen to spend the money. (If you want to read about the development of CDTI do an internet search on CAPSTONE CDTI ADS Capstone was an FAA project in Alaska looking into the use of CDTI. The search though will get you more information on other research and even EUROCONTROL aspects. I have flown with CDTI and the only drawback seemed to be (for GA) that there is a tendency to look down at the CDTI rather than out and as equipage in the open airspace with GA is not ubiquitous there could be aircraft out there that are not on your display while you are head down.

ADS-B (IN) that would allow CDTI in commercial aircraft cockpits is likely to be mandated in around 5 years or so for 5 years later than that. It may be supported by 'Aircraft Access to SWIM' (System Wide Information Management) that (amongst a lot of other things) could also provide the flight data of the other aircraft including its future trajectory rather than a prediction based on its last few seconds flight.

The whole tracking issue is a red herring in this case. They HAD tracking to within 6 miles of the crash site. They had RADAR tracking to within 5 minutes of the apparent crash time, and ADS tracking for a minute after that! How much more tracking do you think we need, can afford, or will do anything useful?

IMO, it was the delay -- 50 minutes! -- in the response to the LOSS of tracking that caused the delay in the start of the search. In this case, that delay did not cause any further loss of life or property, but might cause additional loss in other types of mishaps.

crHedBngr - are you and Airbus pilot? Every Airbus pilot knows the information to which you are referring, but you will note that no one is writing it but you - draw your own conclusions. Just say nothing and be thought a fool rather than open your mouth and remove all doubt. This is really not helpful input at this stage - think of the people who could be reading your comments.

"airline with balls"
 

Last year I was through Juanda in Surabaya on a couple of Garuda flights. I was taken aback by the Air Asia advertising posters in the terminal which had a strap line "Air Asia - the airline with balls". I am led to believe that was an oblique reference to the football club QPR, in which the Air Asia CEO has an interest, but I was immediately put off by it and thankful I was on Garuda.


There has been chat on here about the culture of Asian airlines in general, but that strap line sounds a bit iffy to me and perhaps "just" an indication of attitude in management?

Quote:
Given the heavy automation in the systems, the question is, how does being suddenly thrown into a situation where the automation *isn't* working as expected and where you have to rapidly figure out both the technical and human elements of it, something which makes these sorts of mistakes more likely than they should be?

Quote:
Agreed but if that point can be reached, surely there must be some 'emergency red button' which just disables all automation and "hands back manual control" from whatever law or state the system is currently in/resets all warnings.

this is the sequence of auto flight technology development;

1) First a basic airplane with flight control cables routed to the control surfaces.
2) autopilots developed that have servos that move the cables.

economy drives industry to design aircraft that fly closer in to the edges of the stability envelope, enter stability augmentation systems or yaw dampers.

3) autopilots grow in sophistication with the capability to control aircraft in all three axis and control power, follow navigation signals and move the rudder in response to yaw damper demands.


Up to this point there was a "big red Button." The autopilot, "george" could be turned off and the pilot knew that he was controlling the aircraft control surfaces with no other input. The pilots control columns were linked so that movement of either moves the control surfaces and the other control column. Also the same is true of the autopilot. When george was flying, the control columns/control wheels/ throttles moved and gave feedback and reference as to just what george was up to.

then economy drives industry to want to eliminate the cost of routing control cables/rods and hydraulic power to each flight control, enter fly-by-wire.


4) An autoflight/flight control computer/autopilot system must always fly the fly-by-wire aircraft. there is no manual control to back up to. Worse than that, the autoflight system has various degraded modes that it can step down to.

This new type of aircraft control is not so bad in the event of simple single malfunctions. The problem is that if the pilots become complacent and fail to be up to the minute with what is going on with the performance of the airplane and then encounter a malfunction as in AF447, they are in a bad situation and starting from behind. They must determine which indications are accurate and at what level the autoflight system is operating. Combine this with "stick and rudder" skills that atrophy with continued use of autoflight and rare use of manual flight, the problem is compounded again.

Yes, pilots made bad airmanship mistakes in airplanes with control cables. A DC-10 crossing the Atlantic using vertical speed control to climb to a higher altitude stalled and fell thousands of feet breaking in and out of stall because the pilot flying did not know to unload the wing to recover. The other pilot took over, recovered and the flight landed in Miami with a damaged elevator.

Worse, pilots do not always have the most up to date information on the technology they are operating. Prior to the AirBus crash at New York Kennedy, pilots were taught that below maneuvering speed they could safely fully deflect any control surface. It was not common knowledge that this was not true in the case of sudden control reversal. It is alleged that a sudden abrupt reversal of the rudder snapped off the vertical stabilizer.

The day will soon be upon us when we have pilots who have never flown an aircraft that had fully manual controls. We will develop aircraft, avionics and procedures to deal with this and keep flying as safely as possible but the old axiom applies;

"Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."

Count of Monte Bisto.....
As a high time 320 driver myself your post was well said Sir!

I have been a passanger on Air Asia flights roughly monthly for the most of 2014 due to frequent trips between Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. There is a lot to dislike about them (if you want to drink water you have to pay). But they do have a better safety record than most other carriers in the region (iirc this is their first major disaster).

No major complaints as a passenger, other than the recommendation to pre-book meals.

Your post is correct - but pilots need to be aware that the radar is showing reflectivity from rain not turbulence. (I realize with some I am teaching grandmother to suck eggs here) Apart from some military aircraft with funny paint-jobs most aircraft can manage rain quite successfully. It is turbulence and hail that need to be avoided. Unfortunately, as posts on this thread have noted, rain reflections and turbulence are not always together, indeed extreme turbulence can be found between the radar reflections. Not only that but hail can have a significant 'throw' out of the top of storms and that is why the FAA advise 20 NM separation from large Cb. That is not always possible of course places like the area in question in this post, South Texas and Florida would be unflyable if 20NM were always taken. But be extremely cautious of a natural assumption that red is where the danger is, it is just the area of strongest radar returns. So 3D radar may look everso pretty and really wow the management, but it may not be the tool required to avoid dangerous turbulence, that may be (to the dismay of management) training and experience of the crew.

As always experience is a hard teacher as the exam comes before the lesson. So try to learn from experienced pilots who have had the exam, passed it and learned from it.

That is not ATM, is IP, or packet based. There are no new developments in ATM since longer than a decade now.

ISTR the term 'Big Kahunas' figures prominently in our very own Virgin's current media advertising bumf.

'cojones' next I guess.

Lucky that Brits only understand English

Expect all ATM to move to IPv6 and WIMAX in the near future. The actual network and transport layers are transparent to the applications like FANS. I also expect that FANS both 1/A and 2/B will be totally replaced by a more capable system.

See System Wide Information Management (SWIM), Flight Information eXchange Method (FIXM) and Weather Information eXchange Method (WXXM) and Aeronautical Information eXchange Method (AIXM). All will be available over Aircraft Access to SWIM (AAtS). SESAR and FAA have to settle a few standards issues. But ATM will be enhanced considerably.

I don't want to hijack the thread onto a totally different area that should perhaps be in Tech Log.

Just a point on fly by wire systems. Most systems in use do allow the pilot to disconnect the computers and enter a manual mode. There are different names for this mode such as direct electrical link or manual law. In this mode the aircraft is essentially a conventional aircraft.
Airbus is the exception to allow pilot reversion to a direct electrical link mode. Re versions and mode downgrades are computer controlled and not pilot selectable. The 787 allows manual selection by the pilot via one switch. There are pluses and minuses to both concepts.

Completely unqualified? Pretty strong statement, unless and until the cause is determined to be aircraft-specific ;)