captplaystation

not quite sure what you mean. but yes, I am a current captain for a major airline

and we would certainly talk about changing speed to turbulence penetration speed. its called crm.

when we face rough air ahead, I brief the FA's or have the F/O brief them via the interphone. I make sure they have secured the cabin in advance of the rough air and are buckled in their seat belts.

I have a feeling our airline does things differently than your airline.

I wouldn't expect the F/O to change speeds without informing or seeking concurrence from the capt.

I would expect the captain to announce to the f/o that we were slowing to turbulence penetration speed.


And , just in case you don't know. When we get a clearance for another altitude we have a whole system of setting the altitude in the alerter pointing, saying, verifying.

Who would have thought we would be back here so soon listening for pingers completely unsuitable for the function we now require of them.....

They are extremely short range (and short lived) and so can only be relied upon for locating the recorders when you are in the right vicinity.

Hopefully thy are close to the section they reportedly recovered a body from. However you would hope they would have heard them if that close. Not much you can do about waves, but presumably non essential ships and aircraft can be kept away.

So maybe they are further away. Or maybe burried in silt. Or maybe they didn't survive intact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTn2QxYKqaQ


At the very end of this video of the recovery of a slide, is a shot of the slide inflation cylinder gauge.
Would someone who knows the system care to comment on the position of the needle?

Things work differently in Indonesia than in the US or Europe. The official rules and the real rules don't really have as much overlap as you might expect. This is true both regarding insurance and regulations. Put another way, rules in Indonesia are flexible things but there is a lot of scrutiny into how they are bent.

If they were flying four days a week, chances are the transportation ministry knew what they were up to.

Diving
 

As a diver with almost 30 years experience, diving with 3 to 6 inches of visibility when you know the terrain is as easy as an instrument approach through coastal fog with no wind. With a current and/or exploring even a well known wreck there's a high pucker factor.

Mick the slide was partially inflated so therefore the gauge would be reading low if the door had been smashed open on impact the slide would have or could have inflated.

mickjoebill,

indicator shows that compressed gas from cylinder was transferred, as can be seen at the beginning of the video

A note on slide raft inflation
 

The escape slides do not have an inflation bottle big enough to fully inflate the slide. Instead, the bottles, when triggered by opening the door in auto, blow through a venturi which sucks the ambient air into the slide. An anti-deflation valve traps the resultant mass of air in the inflation chambers. Its a simple system with one moving part.

The downside is that, inflated underwater, the slide cannot fully inflate, and sucks in some water during the inflation sequence. This is why the 737 slides are not also rafts. A slightly better intake location on widebody slides allows them to double as rafts.

Times Strait reports:
 

JAKARTA - Indonesia's transport ministry has ordered airport authorities to take action against staff who allowed Indonesia AirAsia to fly outside its approved schedule.

This comes after the ministry said the airline was not allowed to fly the Surabaya-Singapore route on Sunday. The missing flight QZ8501 had taken off on a Sunday.

"We issued orders to them to move these staff from a position related to flight operations," Djoko Murjatmodjo, acting director general of air transportation, said on Monday.

If there were staff from the transport ministry who were also involved, the ministry will take action against them, he added.

"Investigation is ongoing now. We won't apply a double standard stance. We wont discriminate."

The transport ministry is currently checking the airline's flight schedule to see if they match the airline's permits or agreements, he said.

Additional report on Strait Times:

“....The Basarnas chief said five vessels with the ability to locate black boxes would be deployed on Monday.

On Sunday, the search fleet included six fixed wing planes (four from Indonesia, one each from South Korea and Russia), 14 helicopters (10 from indonesia, two from Singapore and two from the US) and 27 ships (16 from Indonesia including two tankers to help with logistics and fuel, four from Singapore, three from Malaysia, two from the US and two from Japan).

KRI Bung Tomo, the main Indonesian vessel that had helped with sonar detection work, was sent home and was replaced by two vessels on Sunday: KRI Usman Harun and KRI Frans Kaisepo, which also have sonar beaming equipment, he said...."

And here comes the typical knee jerk reaction from the minister for transport and their over simplistic band-aid solutions to a much larger problem in Indonesia.

AirAsia Flight QZ8501: Indonesia mandates pilot briefings before flight departure - South-east Asia News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

Pilot briefing officers went out of fashion about 25 years ago in Australia because the Dept Of Civil Aviation realized pilots were capable of decoding a TAF and Area Forecast themselves without the aid of a talking head.

@Australopithecus


Maybe the reason the slide appears to be quite heavy is that it has an amount of water in it?

Weather briefing
 

Regarding the lack of Weather briefing prior departure :
Yes it might not really be a contributing factor to the actual accident but if proven true , it is in breach of regulations and for the insurance companies an open hangar door.
Plus it seems to become a local political football between the proponents of a strong regulator (State) and the proponents of liberal free enterprise ( the new privately owed airlines ) who do not like too much restrictive rules.
What this whole circus shows is the total inability of the State to control and regulate properly its airlines , but we knew that already from the EU ban .

I'm well aware of that.

The issue in this case may well be that the insurers are European, not Indonesian, and therefore play by the official rules rather than 'local rules', if you take my meaning.

If the flight was not authorised under the terms of the official Indonesian AOC, licenses, and permits, they might well regard that as reasonable excuse to invalidate the cover. Insurance operates under the legal doctrine of 'utmost good faith', remember.

Jakarta Post reports: surabaya mayor provides insurance law experts
 

Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini has offered experts on insurance law from Surabaya Airlangga University, East Java, to help the families of the victims on AirAsia flight QZ8501, which crashed into the Karimata Strait.

“I don’t understand law in the insurance world. That’s why I asked insurance law experts from Airlangga University to assist the victims’ families,” Risma, as the mayor is affectionately called, told The Jakarta Post, Sunday.

Risma said that the experts would assist the victims’ families by examining the calculated insurance values and reading the insurance contract thoroughly so they would not become victims again.

“I want AirAsia to pay to the victims’ families thoroughly,” she said.

She added that assistance would be available for non-Surabayans as well and that she was ready to help communicate with heads of the regions where the respective victims originally came from.

Risma said that all the data concerning the victims who originally came from Surabaya had been collected 12 hours after the aircraft lost contact with Jakarta air traffic control and was sent to banks and insurance offices.

Ronny Tanubun who represented passenger Adrian Fernando, 13, of Surabaya welcomed the mayor’s move, saying that it was the right step to take as most of the families of the flight accident victims did not understand insurance.

“I conveyed my misgivings to Bu Risma after receiving the calculated insurance payments from AirAsia several days ago,” Ronny said.

The aircraft plunged into the Java Sea along with its 155 passengers and 7 crew on Dec. 28. Most of the passengers were Surabaya residents.

AirAsia President Director Sunu Widyatmoko did not respond to the question regarding the insurance payments during a press briefing conducted at the East Java police’s crisis center.

Previously, AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes said that his company would take full responsibility for all the victims and crew members of the ill-fated flight and would provide compensation for the families of the victims.

Separately, chairman of the East Java branch of the Consumer Protection Institute Foundation (YLPK), Said Sutomo, said his office was preparing to sue AirAsia if investigations revealed that the company violated flight license and passenger safety procedures.

Allianz is the leaded insurer for AirAsia
 

Allianz SE (German pronunciation: [ˈaliants] ( listen), al-i-ənts) is a German multinational financial services company headquartered in Munich. Its core business and focus is insurance. As of 2013, it is the world's largest insurance company, the 11th-largest financial services group and 25th-largest company according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine, as well as the largest financial services company when measured by 2012 revenue.

Its Allianz Global Investors division ranks as a top-five global active investment manager, having €1,443 billion of assets under management (AuM), of which €1,131 billion are third-party assets (as of 2010-09-30), with specialized asset managers including PIMCO (bonds), RCM (equities) and Degi (real estate).

The company also owns Euler Hermes, one of the largest credit insurance company in the world.

(note that Allianz has offices on every continent including throughout Asia with their Asia Headquarters in Singapore)

Notwithstanding instructions in company operations manuals it's interesting to note that in the UK ANO under pre flight action of the commander of an aircraft that he/she shall obtain weather before flight that is "reasonably practical to obtain".

I know this is another part of the world but it would be interesting to see what ICAO says on this.

Sometimes you cannot get certain elements of weather before flight. It has been stated earlier in this thread that at the time of day of crew report the met services were often unavailable. In this day and age there are many other online ways of getting weather information many if which are better than some facilities at certain airports.

With respect to the Sig Weather charts it's interesting to look up the definitions of Isolated and Occasional - the former is up to 25% coverage and can "EASILY" be avoided, the latter 50% and can be avoided. On that basis a planned flight through those areas seems quite reasonable to me.

Interesting position to take before the full facts are known.

AirAsia flight QZ8501: Debris found not sufficient to determine cause of crash

normal departure time ?
 

What was the normal departure time for this flight and if it took off much earlier than usual why ?

AirAsia flight QZ8501: Debris found not sufficient to determine cause of crash