It would be interesting to know the maximum possible range from the last known potion. Probably only 3 or so hours - they had perhaps 90 minutes scheduled flying to reach Singapore plus various reserves. An earlier post suggested they had slightly more fuel than the minimum required.

No wreckage after a full day in a fairly crowded area close to shore. Agree that is concerning. I guess Inmarsat are checking for handshakes.

"expert"
 

Responding to Red Bull GMW: Write to that excellence in aviation Knowledge of Richard Quest..
and a question for the board:
do you think this unfortunate incident has anything to do with the crew's capacity/understanding to manage properly the weather radar?

I hope they are - will make useful calibration for MH370 estimates

Irrespective of the cause of this event, why was there no rescue/search aircraft/ship on site within a short space of time? If last contact was at 0724, that leaves at least 12 hours of daylight.

Inmarsat on an A320? Unusual.

Last winter, I wrote here wondering why we don't just put one of those little $100 Spidertracks or Spot GPS things in airliners that GA planes, sailors, etc. use as an interim measure in the wake of MH 370. With no further reference to that flight, it seems absurd that we don't know where hundreds of people are in a quarter billion dollar piece of metal at all times. Now here we are a year later wondering where a plane is, although they'll find this sad flight very quickly, but n the age of tracking your spouse's phone to determine if they are having an affair, the airline industry is still writing SOS on a beach somewhere. Come to think of it, if airline pilots are increasingly getting iPads, can Apple track Capt X's or FO Y's ipad?

@ZAGORFLY You're implying an inadvertent thunderstorm encounter with an ensuing inflight breakup, which is certainly within the realm of possibility. The crew's ability in operating the weather radar is something an investigation would likely look into if that indeed turns out to be a cause, but given the region in which they fly, I'd be disinclined to presume that they were less than competent in operating it.

Umm, this plane had ADS-B which was transmitting GPS data in real-time to ATC. Not to mention it was being actively tracked on primary radar, and the pilot was communicating with a controller less than a minute before contact was lost.

We do. They are called Mode-S transponder...

In most cases last known position is a pretty good indication on where to start looking for the wreckage. LKP in this case is 150kms from land and a good 350km from Jakarta, closest main S/R base. With stormy weather a/c are of little use, and it will take a day for dedicated surface vessels to reach the site.

@lost in saigon
 

Qoute:
Climbing 38,000' doesn't necessarily mean they wanted to fly above the storm. I can think of lots of reasons for the climb:

1) turbulence at lower levels
2) more fuel efficient altitude
3) better visual reference to maneuver around the weather

Maybe it was a combination of all three.

with respect to your view I might add few things here:
1/ I have flown in this area for about 15 yrs and wx is known to be as severe as it could be for monsoon season
2/ Crew was probably briefed before the flight about it
3/ Sophisticated glass cockpit environment
4/ Captain probably flying most of his career in the same area


I can't justify your answers as best option to do mainly coz:
a/ FL380 is very close to Max FL for A320,
b/ what kind of fuel efficiency would you expect for a flight of below 2 hrs and would as PIC think of efficiency when you have severe wx conditions
c/ Visual reference in IMC???

I fly that area fairly often. Due to the amount of moisture, droplet size or whatever, down low everything can look red and just be rain with little turbulence. And, up at altitude, huge buildups can sometimes paint very little. I often climb not to get above the cells but to get on top of the layers to visually assess the structure of the 'isolated embedded CB's' and their overhangs which can be extensive.

One peek is definitely worth a thousand radar scans on the way to Singapore in my experience. Then, safely on the ground, follow the greens...

I didn't write that the plane 'crashed' in a minute.

ATC was in contact with the flight and observed it on radar at 6:16.

At 6:17, radar contact was lost, and radio contact was also lost.

I also have flown in this area often. It does appear a solid line of storms probably topping 50,000 was in the path to Singapore. My guess the boys got into something and said "oh ****" they tried to climb to FL380 and turn 120 degrees. By that time it was too late! The plane broke a apart inside a monster storm.

Only speculation.
 

To loose contact so fast suggests mid air break up with no time to declare an emergency. Hopefully data from ACARS continued transmitting engineering telegrams as in AF447 to give some intial clues until confirmed by recorders when recovered.

in the Asian mindset might it be that they are apt not to declare an emergency to "save face" if they think they have a chance of recovering the situation?

inmarsat
 

inmarsat has stated they have no equipment on this a/c

This flight was on primary radar when lost. Hence this is nothing like MH 370.

Airbubba

"One peek is definitely worth a thousand radar scans on the way to Singapore in my experience."

Couldn't agree more! Mark one eye ball is still a good piece of kit.

Net logging of FDR and CVR data.
 

Apols if anyone has commented on this - MH370 taught the world that there is merit in flight data going to the FDR and CVR, but ALSO to an Internet based repository (- just in case). Can it be, almost a year on, that nothing has been done about this?

Other possibilities are that they ceased to use their working radio after the last communication.

Much information still to be released, like radar returns from altitude to sea floor

It would seem many here do not understand how an ATS system works . In general erratic behaviors / mode S SSR extreme returns are filtered out . So that could explain why the aircraft was maybe not " visible " but the data is in the system and can be retrieved . It just takes time .
Recordings to be recovered and evaluated also take time and need specialists . Their first action is generally not to call the press . So a bit of patience before going into establishing " facts " and deducting wild theories .

So true ATC Watcher. Sadly, most of these people wouldn't have a life if they couldn't do that. The wilder the theory the more they get off with it. Sad.

Much can very easily be done but the problem of course comes down to cost and a justification of what actual benefit such a thing provides. In terms of actual safety it provides no benefit at all bar letting investigators know what was happening to the aircraft before finding the flight recorders.

It costs a huge amount of money to maintain a satellite link and to therefore transfer flight data in real time, I really doubt it is possible to do so economically. Factor in how many aircraft are in the sky and all of them maintaining satellite links... That is serious bandwidth.

I hate to mention the worst but this plane will be found and occurances like MH370 are thankfully extremely rare to almost unheard of. Engineering a hugely expensive comms link for real time flight data transfer is just not necessary.

The Internet repository at FL350 is called satellite transmission. Lack of bandwidth and/or huge costs is your answer.

"This flight was on primary radar when lost. Hence this is nothing like MH 370."

so what else than midair breakup could happen to get lost from the primary radar? (provided it was not on the limit of radar coverage area)

Downwind Lander,

Pretty much as blue_ashy & Caygill have told you.

The limited number of scenarios, and the rarity of the instances in which said scenarios have/would/could occur is what makes is a pointless endeavor to have live data.

As blue_ashy & Caygill say, its not just the underlying technology, because its 2014 and so the technology is there. The problem is with the associated opex and capex.

The opex of building and certifying the system, the cost of the airlines to acquire and install such systems etc.

The capex of maintaining such systems, and of paying all those expensive satellite comms bills etc.

And of course, probably the fact that the limited number of satellites "up there" could probably not cope with the combined volume of data that would be generated by all the aircraft "up there". Its not like they can launch new satellites on a whim without yet more vast expenditure.

I suspect the manufacturers and satellite operators would find it easier to sell pork in a Kosher butchers than to convince their airline customers to roll out such technology across their fleets. Airlines are not exactly rolling in money, its a highly competitive business on wafer thin margins.... and I very much doubt the SLF will be willing to pay higher ticket prices. :E

Low height. Electromagnetic waves as used to by radar follow quasi-optical rules, so limits imposed by the earths curvature ("below the horizon") apply here as well.

Caygill says: "The Internet repository at FL350 is called satellite transmission. Lack of bandwidth and/or huge costs is your answer".

Don't forget that the repository entry for each flight can be wiped and space recycled at the end of each flight.

An important point is that when something happens, the data is needed VERY QUICKLY INDEED or the exercise becomes one of salvage.

Question: What would be the percentage increase in overhead costs to the industry? [You may use the exponential notation]

Three people have just spelled it out to you .....:ugh:

Data storage would the cheapest part of the whole solution, infact it verges on irrelevant in the context of the other costs.

The main problem in terms of operational expenditure surrounds the use of satellite communications. Which isn't cheap, and will probably suffer from capacity issues if all airlines used it.

Pile the operational expenditure on top of the capital expenditure and you can see why your dream is destined to remain a dream. It simply is not workable from a financial point of view given the highly limited number of rare circumstances where it would be useful.

I would imagine there is a slight difference between a Cessna 206 and a commercial airliner flying at 35,000 feet across multiple countries.

Read what Downwind Lander is proposing.

He wants live streaming of telemetry data.

oI'm sure you mixed primary and secondary radar. ATC works with secondary radar, which is the interaction of ground station with aircraft transponder, what you see on the scope is the signal information of the aircraft transponder.

Primary radar is an active ground radar and its reflected energy displayed on a radar scope.

The time where radar contact was lost points only to the point, where the aircraft transponder stopped transmitting. There are multiple reasons for such an occurance.

As already mentioned, data storage would be the cheapest part and therefore is not the problem.

Getting live data from the aircraft down to a hard drive somewhere else in the world is the problem.

In remote locations, only satellite can be used to transfer this data and maintaining a constant satellite link for every aircraft in the sky is next to impossible to do economically and maybe even practically.

And of course this problem is one of salvage, having a live data stream would not deter the fact that this aircraft has crashed so it does nothing really for aviation safety bar solve a problem rarely encountered.

been there done that
 

Was in 747-100 cargo from syd-hkg same time frame nothing was painting on radar I went back to galley to get coffee as I came back up the captain said to strap in we hit a cell rising fast went from fl33 to fl39 in seconds and wild airspeed swings then back down to fl33 all three of us looked at each other and said what the hell was that? As a side note this aircraft was number 3 off the production line !
:=

Weather was all bad
 

I flew just a few hours before this flight took off from Surabaya. Our radar was nothing but,skull and crossbones over most of Indonesia and the Java sea. Also to not. Jakarta radar does not depict weather. There ATC is 30 years behind at best. Coverage is intermittent. So, the likelihood of an airplane vanishing in this area is extremely high.

Oh please !! :ugh::ugh:

If you're going to quote an example at least quote a decent one in a similar environment (i.e air, sea ... or somewhere in deepest darkest Antarctica or whatever).

Quoting a ground based solution to an aviation problem is totally irrelevant and pointless.

Fedex, UPS, taxi operators .... they track their vehicles using M2M. And typically these days this operates over mobile/cellular networks. Maybe with failover to satellite, but not normally, because .... yep, you guessed it ... satellite ...is... EXPENSIVE ! So you'll probably only find that on those armored cash-carrying trucks etc.

Statistically speaking...
 

... any country losing 3 major aircraft ENR in a year is so vanishingly small as to be statistically impossible.

There have been 15 ENR losses of aircraft with more than 50 passengers in the last decade, and with 150 countries flying, that means each country had a 1% chance of losing an aircraft in any given year. That means one chance in a million of losing three.

Except the aircraft that has gone missing is Indonesian. Air Asia is a franchise business.

Nonsense mixture!:=

The idea is live streaming of telemetry data ONLY in case of an emergency or suspect deviations from planned route, altitude, heading, speed, flight law, g factor etc. It would provide the exact coordinates of last transmission!
That's not expensive, just a tiny bit in comparison to the search effort already spent.

A very rare event I'd hope. Weather-wise I've led a sheltered life; only experienced what I'd call moderate turbulence (perhaps the pax wouldn't) and had a lightning strike once.