AirAsia Flight Missing - 155 on board

[PIMking]

[Kavvy]

No idea if this is bad or not, but this dude on Twitter is reporting that "it ended up at 36300ft and climbing but ground speed only 353 knots"

He also seems to have fairly up to date info

https://twitter.com/GerryS

[Acey]

Originally Posted by Kavvy

No idea if this is bad or not, but this dude on Twitter is reporting that "it ended up at 36300ft and climbing but ground speed only 353 knots"

I'd need to see what he was doing before... if the speed/altitude were changing wildly that's obviously a problem (and an indicator of severe turbulence potentially strong enough to cause structural damage) but if I saw that type of airplane was consistently at 36,000 ft and 350 knots I'd assume he had a crappy ~90 knot headwind and wouldn't think anything else of it.

[kaisin82]

airasia is a malaysian budget airlines. what puzzles me is the proximity between Singapore and Indonesia, it's just a 2hr flight. Wonder how many are travelling to Singapore for the countdown party. Hope that there will be news soon

[TheyCallMeBruce]

Malaysian carriers just can't catch a break. 3 planes in one year.

[KelVarnsen]

Good article on airlines and thunderstorms.
http://www.nycaviation.com/2014/08/l...s/#.VJ_TlF4ANA

[combustiblefuel]

Why risk a flight if weather was going to be a factor. Its 2014 if this incident was due to weather related problems why not ground it?. I know meteorology is not perfect but I am sure there had to be some indication previously to suggest a storm could potentially disrupt flight patterns.

[Tsawwassen]

Here we go again. Like others have said, let their be closure on this one. The conspiracy theories are going to go crazy if the plane can't be found.

[Tsawwassen]

Originally Posted by TheyCallMeBruce

Malaysian carriers just can't catch a break. 3 planes in one year.

Bad things come in three. I hope for the best here.

[Tsawwassen]

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/airasia-plane-with-162-on-board-missing-en-route-to-singapore/ar-BBhhR9T?ocid=mailsignoutmd
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/airasia-flight-qz8501-loses-contact-with-air-traffic-control-1.2884831

[Leon]

Seems like S&R has been suspended due to nightfall.

It appears like it could certainly be a weather issue. Wasn't there a Silk Air flight a number of years ago that ran into a weather problem in this area?

[Acey]

Originally Posted by combustiblefuel

Why risk a flight if weather was going to be a factor. Its 2014 if this incident was due to weather related problems why not ground it?. I know meteorology is not perfect but I am sure there had to be some indication previously to suggest a storm could potentially disrupt flight patterns.

Hindsight is 20/20 I guess, but their dispatchers would have been looking at the same satellite images JonDuke posted, among others. Looks like there were a couple other planes in the area so they weren't the only ones that tried to get through. Too early to definitively say that they shouldn't have been flying, but I tend to agree with you - somebody made a judgement call and it didn't turn out well.

[JonDuke]

Daylight should be coming into play any time now.
Water levels in that area are (apparently) relatively low, so hopefully (if it did indeed crash) the weather cooperates and they can find the wreckage soon.

[Peanut]

How have they still not found anything?!?

[flamesfan6]

Originally Posted by Peanut

How have they still not found anything?!?

massive area to search and not a whole lot to go on to narrow the search area down.

Also if this was the first incident of this in recent history it would be a valid question and assumption they would of found something .. but given that within the year there is another plane (within generally same area) that is still yet not to be found ... I don't think it's a given that anything will be found within 24-48 hours.

Lets hope we actually find the plane and what happened here.

[Tsawwassen]

An Indonesian helicopter searching for the missing AirAsia jetliner saw two oily spots in the water Monday, and an Australian search plane spotted objects elsewhere in the Java Sea, but it was too early to know whether either was connected to the aircraft and its 162 passengers and crew. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/airasia...-jet-1.2885147

[Peanut]

Originally Posted by flamesfan6

massive area to search and not a whole lot to go on to narrow the search area down.

Also if this was the first incident of this in recent history it would be a valid question and assumption they would of found something .. but given that within the year there is another plane (within generally same area) that is still yet not to be found ... I don't think it's a given that anything will be found within 24-48 hours.

Lets hope we actually find the plane and what happened here.

Yeah, that's my point though. We know where our friggin cell phones are at all times thanks to GPS. How is it possible that multi-million dollar machines carrying hundreds of people are not being live-tracked? It's just insane to me that MH370 "vanished" completely. And this plane is looking more likely it will be found, but how can they not know where to look? That's the part that, imo, is a very valid question. They SHOULD know where to look. The fact that they don't is a fairly significant problem, imo. The status quo of just sort of guesstimating where these planes are is obviously not good enough.

[flamesfan6]

Originally Posted by Peanut

Yeah, that's my point though. We know where our friggin cell phones are at all times thanks to GPS. How is it possible that multi-million dollar machines carrying hundreds of people are not being live-tracked? It's just insane to me that MH370 "vanished" completely. And this plane is looking more likely it will be found, but how can they not know where to look? That's the part that, imo, is a very valid question. They SHOULD know where to look. The fact that they don't is a fairly significant problem, imo. The status quo of just sort of guesstimating where these planes are is obviously not good enough.

We don't know the circumstances yet - they wanted to raise altitude - did they go to high? Did equipment (such as what is used for GPS and tracking) freeze and stop working/provide invalid data? I'm sure somewhere out there, people are trying to find a more reliable system to ensure planes always have some sort of system that pings their location after MH370 happened.

And if it is at the bottom of the ocean, then they are really looking for little bits of debris / sign on the surface to then try to find deep down in the ocean. Then factor in currents, waves, wind, etc then even if they find debris it won't be 100% reliable on that's the spot, just gives a better search area.

Not every bit of technology is perfect, clearly. Things can go wrong, it's just really weird this happened twice in the same year. The Air France 447 flight took 2 years to find the plane.

[ken0042]

They are being live tracked. The problem is the size of the search area. The plane was flying at over 200 metres per second; at an attitude of 10 km. So assuming they know the last point of contact before it started to go down, it would have taken at least 45 seconds to hit the sea. Now factor in that speed and you are looking at a search area of about 30 square kilometres. If it hit the water intact, there would be very little debris on the surface of the water.

Now factor in that they may have had the location 10 seconds before it went down, and you are into a search area of 300 square kilometres.

[Peanut]

If it was being live-tracked, wouldn't it be live tracked as it descended? To me it doesn't seem "live" if they're saying "yeah, we saw it climb to 36,000 feet and then we're not really sure what happened after that because we lost the radar". Unless it broke up in the air I guess. So if you lose the radar does that automatically mean the plane has had some catastrophic failure? I don't think that's the case.

Anyways. I guess chances of survivors are slim to none, but if it takes 48+ hours to even find the plane, anyone who might have survived the crash isn't going to survive two nights in the ocean.

And @flamesfan6, with Air France took two years to find the plane but they found the wreckage within days in the middle of the Atlantic.