Yep, you tell the geniuses back at the training building these sea stories (now, this is no s**t...) and they act like you are making it up. They start talking about tilt angle versus altitude formulas and the spheroid equivolumetric diameter of the rain drops.

Down in the WSJC FIR (it's been a while since I've flown to JKT though) you really do get some buildups, often embedded, that barely paint on the weather radar. In the goo or at night you can be flying along fat dumb and happy and boom, all hell breaks loose. Turbulence, St. Elmo's Fire, airspeed and altitude fluctuations. Then as suddenly as it began, you are back out of it in smooth air.

The sun should have been coming up when QZ 8501 lost contact. The timezones flying SUB-SIN are bass ackwards, as you go west you end up an hour later.

With all the morning traffic in the area it is not uncommon to be stuck lower than you want, especially on a relatively short sector with good altitude performance in a light airliner. With modern aircraft going high is often the most fuel efficient path even on a short route but it might not make sense from an ATC perspective.

That sound bite about 'weather can't cause an aircraft to crash' has been picked up by CNN's Richard Quest and others. It grabs attention, provokes discussion and is usually put in the context that it is the pilots' (sometimes written pilot's) reaction, or lack of reaction, to the weather that can cause the mishap. Fair enough I suppose.

IntuVue 3-D radar
 

Can someone tell me if the new weather IntuVue 3-D radar is now installed on any airliners.

Even 30kbps is probably overkill. I am pretty sure Iridium said they could offer the service for free if the airlines would install the units themselves. 1kb/minute would probably be enough data to cover 2 position reports every minute. Could be less than a megabyte a flight. As someone said, data charges for all commercial aircraft world wide would be significantly less than a SAR operation such as was undertaken for MH370.

A few of the aircraft I trained in had a system called SPIDERTRACKS that operated a little satellite communications thing. It would constantly ping my position to HQ and in the event of an engine shutdown (power failure to the circuit it was on) it would send an Alarm back to Spidertracks HQ who would pass it on to my training provider. This would of course go off all the time as people would forget to inhibit the system prior to engine shutdown on the ground. Such a simple system though so it isn't even new technology.

Pilots are taught to aviate, navigate and then communicate (their emergency).

Primary activation has to be automatic (with manual backup). Even Scully (Hudson River ditching) forgot to activate the ditching switch on his Airbus. (Correction: Scully didn't have time to run through his checklists)

You need a position reporting system which operates even after main electrical bus failures (as experienced in engine flameouts and mid-air breakups) and in situations in which the pilots are fighting for control (hands busy), etc. If you have electrical bus problems, the aircraft position sensors may not be sending the data to the emergency transmission system.

IMHO, constant or frequent periodic transmission seems to be a much more reliable method.

ATC facilities in the area
 

CDN ATC at #223 suggests there is little primary radar in the area of interest and what there is has only 100 mile range. Elsewhere she suggests that ATC radar is "mosaiced" together to form a composite picture.

Firstly there is a great deal of radar in the area and most of it is both long range primary RSR with SSR on the same rotating radar head. Range of the PSR is sometimes limited to 180 nm but can exceed 200 nm at the levels of interest.

At the very least, WIHH Jakarta, WIPP Palembang, WIIS Semarang, WARR Surabya have coverage in this area as well as some Malaysian stations. Whilst the Indonesian AIP is not currently available on line in English, a quick look at the source data being used by FlightRadar 24 will confirm this assertion - and you will also find a strange radar called TEST1 in operation too - who knows where that one is located.

The combining of radar data from multiple sources by use of a Mosaic tile system is a North American phenomenon. Most radar in this part of the world is of European origin (because French and Italian companies pay the biggest bribes) and Europe does not normally use the Mosaic system but rather a mullti-radar tracking system whereby the weighted average position from multiple sites are combined to give one "average" aircraft position. Regardless, Indonesian ATC is not exactly a paragon of modernity and is more likely to be using single source radar on any given display.

The reason for the continued existence of PRI radar in the area is that unlike Canada where the biggest threat is your neighbour to the south, life is not always so eternally peaceful in Asia. There are many countries very close to each other here. Indonesia has a population of 253 million, over seven times that of Canada with Malaysia only a few miles distant population 30 million, Singapore 5 million etc. Hence the need to maintain PRI radar for defence purposes as well as civil aviation.

So maybe CDN ATC you are not an ATC expert when it comes to south east Asia no matter what your homeland experience may be? But why worry, the amount of misinformation on this site never ceases to amaze me!

Yes there may well be some data that was automatically captured and stored. As with MH370, will be less than 100% transparency regarding this - no one wants to reveal their capability (or lack of capability).

That's assuming it was within range of primary radar anyway. Its last known position was a fair way off shore, and even further away from any major centres.

What is the primary coverage like in the Java sea between Jakarta and Borneo?It may not be that great

Almost all international flights now have ADS-B which does the same thing at two second intervals. And yes, you can track planes with any PC.

See: Flightradar24.com - Indonesia-Singapore Area

Aircraft parameter and position remote monitoring is a reality. A proven technology already exists for this and it is being used.
AFIRS, originally developed by Canadian AeroMechanical Services, a service now offered by Flyht, can radiate data for flight following and remote system monitoring to base through the Iridium satellite network at a regular rate. It can be programmed, though, to enter continuous transmission mode in the event abnormal aircraft parameters are detected.
It can at present be interfaced to several aircraft systems to report, for example, engine trend, fuel, exceedance alarms, etc.
The potential is there.

In normal state of alert, the Indonesian National Air Defense Command operate their Early Warning (E/W) radar network for a minimum of 18 hours a day (presumably the hours are on a rotating basis).

No one has to be "looking at" a particular aircraft as radar data are kept for a period of time.

In this case, we have two radar positions of interest. One is the facility at Belitung Island (at the Hanandjoeddin air force base). The second is the Iskandar AFB radar facility at Pangkalanbun, Central Borneo.

From the last known position, both facilities are well within PSR range of even the older Thompson-CSF radars we know the NADC operates. These E/W radars have a range of over 200nm. The NADC also has newer BAE Commander long range surveillance radars.

According to an Air Force spokesman this morning, the AirAsia flight was tracked to its last known position at bearing 247 degrees, 127nm from Pangkalanbun.

No, they never reached that item on the Dual Engine Failure checklist. They didn't have enough time.

Thanks PeeKay4. Unfortunately that word "known" leaves a lot of wriggle room. Those stated ranges are (presumably) for cruise flight levels. They will be much shorter range at lower levels - this systems are not over the horizon capability.

If the aircraft had really been tracked close to its last position, we should have found something yesterday. The Indonesian primary radar data would not have been released to the public. But the Indonesian military and civilian authorities would sure know where to look for an Indonesian aircraft carrying mostly Indonesian citizens.

Hope I'm wrong, but its looking a lot like MH370.
1. Over water. Pretty much equidistant from major centres. Would not have to descend too far to get below the horizon of any operating primary radar.
2. Dark. Early hours of Sunday morning.
3. ATC advised of weather and a request to deviate. So loss of radio, loss of secondary radar and then loss of primary radar not entirely out of the blue. Would look a bit like AF447 with upset and stall.
4. No wreckage found so far.

By way of clarification, I meant that systems may not even have been operational at that time - not that an operator was siting at a screen monitoring traffic.

Sunrise in Surabaya was about 5:14 local time. The sun was up the whole flight as far as I can tell.

Sadly, no.

We have this collective "CSI syndrome" that due to technology, "find my iPhone" and TV, we expect everything to happen in an instant.

But real life search can be a very difficult task -- especially underwater -- even with the best of information. There have been wreckage found only after extensive searching at the same exact area for months.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) the Indonesians are very good at methodically finding and recovering wreckage, given the amount of experience they have in major accident investigations over the years.

Earlier reports that the Captain had only 6100 hours was incorrect. That's his time on the A320 with Air Asia alone.

From a friend who knows Captain Irianto, he started his flying career in the Indonesian Airforce as an F-16 pilot. After military service, he joined Merpati Nusantara Airlines flying the F-28 before flying with Adam Air and later Sriwijaya Air on the 737 before joining Air Asia. He has 20,537 hours TT making him a very experienced operator in this region.

What the heck?
 

I have posted on THIS thread and the thread of MH370 several times, a simple way to track aircraft by GPS with updates every minute or less, with an uninterruptable power supply and battery backup all the way to the incident site...and my posts keep getting deleted/moderated. NOT advocating and commercial brand or anything like that.

If you can't post such POSITIVE constructive ideas on this site in reference to these incidents, then what the heck is it worth?

Are we ONLY supposed to speculate what happened? Are we ONLY supposed to parrot and quote news reports? Ridiculous! If I can't post on this site anymore (as in, if THIS post is deleted) I am just going to cancel my account and depart....I am a professional pilot with 20+ years of experience and flying in the region of these incidents....if I can't post on here, WHO can?

@ island airphoto
All commercial vessels are equipped with AIS (VHF transponder, which automatically transmits position reports) and SSAS (a satellite based reporting system, which can be polled), these systems are in addition to VHF and HF DSC systems.

With reference to the last position wonder if the Ozzie Jindalee OTHR system tracked this flight, provided it was switched on and operational (weekend!). Supposedly they can see and track a Cessna taking off from East Timor.

re - Jindalee radar
 

@ andrikik - good point methinks, given that in the right wx they can watch aircraft going in and out of HK, Singapore.

Caveats...

1. Being cagey about hinting at performance - this is the region Jindalee is looking at. Lots of people know stuff about various accidents and will never share - part of life in the netherword :-(

2. Wx poor - atmosphere full of moisture and other variables.

3. Perhaps limited info was part of the "help" Australia offered yesterday?

Some great data and ancillary info in this thread - it's been good to check back every hour or two since yesterday. Less trolling that most places :-)

The radar installed on 320 series has an "AUTO" setting that is used almost universally by the Asian pilots I have flown with. I have flown with Vietnamese, Chinese, PI, Thai, Korean, Indonesian, and Malaysian pilots. Every one of them used AUTO.

The problem is AUTO is not accurate a significant amount of time. Over flat terrain and water, maybe 80% accurate or a little higher. Over mountainous terrain maybe 50% or less. It will paint ground terrain as a Tstorm, and when it is doing that, it will not paint any actual weather as the return from the ground is vastly higher than that from any weather. The radar has turned its' gain down automatically because of the high returns from the ground.

Flying over Indonesia using AUTO, it would be very easy to fly right through a huge thunderstorm in an Airbus. I have seen it too many times.

My legacy carrier has a little sticker on the AUTO setting. The sticker says

"INOP"

Its hard not to speculate that this was weather.A few posts have given some good insight and they need repeating:
a)Never ever try to outclimb a cell
b)Speed margin is critical-hence choice of level
c)Interpretation of wx radar is an art and surprisingly over-looked in training
d)Once in it,enage cws,disengage AT,set turb N1 and fly attitude only

Pay-to-fly crews are common in Asia(no inference here to Air Asia or this crew).However,there are many airlines flying today with FO's neither trained nor allowed to takeoff and land,never mind interpret a wx radar screen and formulate a plan of action to avoid multiple cells.Wouldnt have been a dry cell here so either they didnt know how to use or interpret the wx radar or if they did,their avoidance action was insufficient.

All the Asian airlines(and many others also) use this pay-to-fly or fly free cadet system and its alarming.Ive seen a pilot try to follow the magenta line right into a storm that would tear the plane apart.And they dont land or takeoff yet theyre signed off(ie.theres no safety pilot which begs the question..what if the Captain keels over?).Ive watched in the sim where the pilot cant handle a simple V1 cut yet is always signed off.And these same guys are upgraded to left seat once they get the 3000 hours,all of it on autopilot.Only a while back,we saw the embarassing and sad crash of a 777 at KSFO simply because there was no electronic glideslope and they couldnt fly.We werent allowed to say anything because it wasnt pc or because it was racist.But these accidents cost lives and something must be said.

There is no substitute for airmanship and two experienced pilots upfront who have the healthiest respect for ITCZ weather.They steer well clear and they dont wait for ATC either(very often VHF will be temporarily lost due static and some guys want to keep the magenta line until they get clearance).

As others have said, it was NOT dark. Sunrise at local time was 5:15 AM and the aircraft lost contact at around 6:17 AM.

That's not exactly "dark".

There are air disasters where the wreckage was not located for 24-48 hours, some even longer (remember AF447?). Yes the flight is still "missing" despite some unconfirmed reports of wreckage sighting, but people need to think about this a little more logically than come to the conclusion "this is looking a lot like MH370".

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.