Air Asia Stall at 37,000 feet - Air Crash Investigation 2020 - Mayday Air Disaster

5:15 am December 28, 2014 Jaanda Airport Surabaya Indonesia 155 passengers and 7 crew members board an AirAsia flight on a routine Hawk flight to Singapore one of the busiest airports in the world Air traffic controllers assign the Flight callsign Wagon Air 8501 at the helm is Captain The mysterious Anto, a 53-year-old former fighter pilot with more than 20,000 flight hours under his belt. The co-pilot is the Frenchman Remi and Manuel Place, 45 years old. He has flown more than 2,000 hours. Also on board is a 22-year-old trainee stewardess. Anisha Haydar Fauci. The planned route from Surabaya crosses the equator through latitudes that are home to the world's most destructive climate known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

It is the hottest place on the planet. I believe that the sea surface temperatures in the Intertropical Convergence Zone mean that there is a lot of moisture entering the atmosphere from the ocean. Water vapor is the fuel for tropical storms where the energy comes from, although it is the air. warm the one that creates storms here when it reaches high altitude the temperatures inside the clouds drop dramatically to -112 degrees Fahrenheit as cold as winter in Antarctica inside the Operations Center the weather is constantly monitored 32 attic or DC young howard burkan was the milan observer in the protection watch aside a rush to repair the tissue the masala data the pusher the singapore sanghamitra mata fornia the cordis monitor is singing the prognosis is clear but that could change at any time basically it's the bread and butter of the pilots who fly in the tropics is that they are always on virtually every flight flying around storms the plane is an airbus a320 one of the most technologically advanced in the skies and the best selling single island airliner in the world this plane has flown thirteen thousand five hundred times covering more than 23,000 flight hours passengers and crew settle in twenty-five minutes into the flight the aircraft cruises at around 32,000

feet

and is now operating on autopilot I learned that at the time the autopilot pilots the plane, it is a normal flight, there is nothing abnormal in the situations or scenarios in which the Airbus 320 autopilot system consists of seven computers, planes are like computer games, nowadays there are many pilots you just engage autopilot as soon as they're getting up to altitude and don't touch it until you get back home and you can do it then it's literally that easy as the plane gets closer to the equator the storm clouds are brewing over the Java Sea below, severe storms may occur. from very small storms to very large and dangerous storms in a matter of a few minutes you can see a storm in front of you or below you and in the few minutes it takes you to get there it could have risen several thousand

feet

above you air traffic controllers receive the final radio transmission of flight 8501 s.

The plane requests permission to turn left and climb. Traffic control will know where other planes are and will allow you to turn or not, as they can sometimes delay your turn. until another heir has passed several nearby planes have already changed course to avoid flying into the heart of the storm some of our laughter diverted there are some diverted some arrived flying higher with so many flights in the same airspace air traffic controllers deny 8501 request to climb above the storm you will be denied a promotion - a very normal thing happens on practically all flights because there you will pass by planes flying in the same direction as you.

It is always better to fly through the weather than to hit another plane with the possibility of severe turbulence ahead. The crew faces a critical decision of whether to stay on course or change direction. This plane was the only one at 32,000 feet at the time. The other planes were flying. on the same air routes there were thirty-four between thirty and 38,000 feet this animation shows the flight trajectory of the plane final minutes on the way to Singapore at 6:16 the radar data records that the plane is sailing at about 32,000 feet seconds later it is still sailing but The plane then deviates from its course and turns to the left that the autopilot would have been flying it with, so direction changes are made by turning a knob instead of flying it with the joystick.

The 155 passengers on board have no idea that they are just two minutes away from

disaster

. On December 28, 2014, the AirAsia flight to Singapore

crash

es in a storm. Modern airplanes are designed to withstand the turbulence produced by severe weather, but a storm is not a place any pilot wants to be. one job to do the guide was that you would run into some thunderstorms that they didn't know how severe they would be, they didn't know exactly where they would be so you won't know until you get into them and then when you get into it at some point it's too much Afternoon a massive thunderstorm is the biggest danger to a passenger airliner crew in the last 50 years Bad weather has been a factor in more than half of fatal commercial airliner accidents and there is so much energy that is released in a storm like that is just chaotic it's dangerous it's turbulent and there's an extra force of nature to deal with total lightning total lightning is both the cloud to ground lightning that we're all used to seeing when it hits the ground but in strong storms there are ten times more lightning in the clouds at 6:16 the radar data records that the plane is cruising at about 32,000 feet but then the plane turns left and for reasons still unknown it goes up abruptly there it would be dark to be lightning if the rain it was very loud on the plane you would hear it the plane can shake the instruments can become blurry while your head shakes and your eyeballs literally shake your head responsibility is amazing you have many people's lives on board, you don't really focus on that when you fly and you know that's the honest truth, what you're thinking about is your own safety, but flying the plane like it's supposed to be and if you take care of yourself, you're going to be taking care of everyone else on that plane and they're not It is only the pilots who are pushed to the limit when a plane enters the turn, if they will be exposed to forces around the plane that push it in a particular direction and which may be torsional torque and loading and unloading stresses in the airframe, the plane climbs through 37,000 feet as it climbs, its speed slows to just over 400 miles per hour just 20 seconds later, the flight is around 38,000 feet and then decelerates further at 6 : 18 a.m. plane disappears from radar within an hour air traffic control announces they have lost track of plane distraught families are desperate for answers airport manager trekker aha Joe prepares for the worst Tammy can juga sakala swattin major agency center every time more like sarana communicati Cambodian and permanent of the Compliance Commission cannot and Kagami mania can inform us information dependent on tania and akitaka in a popular monitor talkative non-lawyer applause contact then the news is made public it is feared that sixty-two people have died afterwards After an AirAsia flight disappears in three hours a massive international search effort is launched led by the Indonesian military also in support of our Australian, American, Russian, Singaporean and Chinese search teams with 30 ships, three warships and more of 20 aircraft equipped with visual radar and sonar surveillance covering a search.

In a 60,000 square mile area of ​​the Java Sea, this disappearance immediately brings back memories of an infamous unsolved mystery from the same region nine months earlier, on March 7, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board an hour later. the scheduled flight disappeared from radar screens the search effort was the largest ever undertaken but failed to find the missing plane what happened remained unknown for three days the world wondered if this would be another never-ending mystery could it be terrorism or a rogue pilot but then the wreckage is discovered all the evidence points to the plane

crash

ing into the sea everyone on board is dead one of the first bodies to be recovered is that of trainee flight attendant Karen Isha Haydar Fossey her funeral becomes a focus of national mourning unlike MH370 here there is no missing plane the mystery is how this happened 10 days after the first remains were located there is a breakthrough a black box that records the data of the AirAsia plane that fell in front of Indonesia has arrived in Jakarta to be examined while the recovery operation continues.

Experts around the world are beginning to ask how it is possible that one of the most sophisticated planes in the world suddenly fell from the sky. I don't know what happened. We have to know what caused it first. most important for the families as they want to know what happened they want to know the truth but of course they deserve to know the truth the priority for the families is to ensure that a similar

disaster

does not happen again the official

investigation

is ongoing but based on information not published and expert analysis it is now possible to explore the key factors that likely influenced the final moments of the plane and this can change the way you feel when flying, although researchers have the black box of the flight, it only tells part of the story. history, investigators delve into the data to discover the origin of the accident, we understand that there are three conditions that can cause the accident first the instrument or perhaps the plane itself human error and the last is the weather situation the first question is what caused it the plane climbed so quickly after cruising at about 32,000 feet that the plane turned left and climbed abruptly just 40 seconds later, the plane exceeds 37,000 feet 38,000 feet, that is, a climb of almost 6,000 feet in less than a minute , three times faster than normal and outside the parameters established by the autopilot, so the plane was out of control or was a direct action by the pilot. 6000 feet per minute is a pretty considerable climb in altitude, not least when performance is not good, it is possible that they raised the nose and traded speed for altitude, that is possibly what happened, that the plane climbed too steeply, but there could have been other.

For this reason it is possible that they entered an updraft and were carried away by an air bubble. Basically, it's very turbulent, very chaotic and very dangerous, and then what goes up has to come down, so you get a massive updraft and then you get a massive updraft. downdraft and that's just a terrible scenario for an airplane and a pilot that you don't want to get into. Experts have a good idea of ​​what happened after the plane surpassed 38,000 feet. The AirAsia flight must have

stall

ed. Most people understand loss as they would. when they are driving a car and that would be the engine stopping, that is not the case with an airplane, a

stall

ing airplane means that the airflow has actually separated from the wing and the airplane is no longer flying at this point, it is literally falling like a dead man. weight in the sky the engine is still running but the plane is falling to see how this affects the aircraft in flight test pilot dr.

Guy Gretton is examining the profile of a wing in a wind tunnel. In the wind tunnel you can see the flow demonstrated by these smoke lines when flying level, the airflow is constant around the wing, but then as the angle of attack changes, if this happens on a climb, you reach to a point where the flow begins to separate starting at the upper rear surface and then breaks completely. This is known as the type of stall that will test your skills by pushing this aircraft to its limits and stall will never dynamically stall occur when the surface, the way the disease is too inefficient but causes the aircraft to completely or partially lose the control.

This light aircraft is a Grumman AAA five, but the aerodynamic principles are the same for any aircraft, including the AirAsia flight. If the airplane stalls, a good pilot should immediately reduce the angle of attack and increase power to recover. If he does not do this, the curious thing is that the descent speed increases and the plane will remain in a stall until it stalls. on the ground or near a board of interest to an unprepared pilot the effects of a stall can be catastrophic during takeoff in Afghanistan after its cargo moved to the rear of the hold this cargo plane stopped in this level the guy is cruising but at a very high altitude where the AirAsia plane was flying, all the planes reached a point where speed becomes critical, it is an area known to pilots as coffin corner.

The coffin corner exists at a high altitude and flying in those conditions is actually very difficult because you have to manage the speed of the plane very precisely, each plane has a maximum and minimum speed, the factor that complicates thesituation is that the higher the altitude the smaller the margin of error between going too slow or too fast if you go high enough what you do is reach a point where the stall speed and the maximum speed are very close together and we prefer that the plane is in the corner of the coffin because if you go faster you will lose control or break the plane and if you go slower you will lose control of the plane.

So it's a very vulnerable place, whether or not you're high up in a coffin or at low altitudes, a stall presents a unique challenge for a pilot: you're going to bleed anything below 60 knots, you risk a loss, a guy just plays on the front leg you can see the speed is threatened bleeding now 65 knots I have stolen his speed what happened to the ear it will be explained tomorrow you can see the nose rising I have lost sight of the horizon in front of me approximately 55 on the rebound In the weeks after the AirAsia flight crashed into the sea, one thing emerged as a crucial stall factor, the guy is raising the trumpet, Gretton is investigating what a stall means for pilots and that means losing control of his plane.

I don't want the plane to fall 200 feet. Don't do it and I have recovered planes from the snow to regain control. the guide lowers the nose to gain speed and then levels a tent very dramatic if you don't expect it it can be quite scary I might even lift my seat hit my head against the ceiling in the cabin all commercial aircraft are stall tested but it is This is what happened to the AirAsia flight when it climbed too steeply and, if so, how did the plane get to this dangerous point? Pilots are trained to recognize stall.

In fact, the first thing pilots are trained to do is approach the stall. The captain of the AirAsia flight. He was a former fighter pilot with 20,000 hours of flying under his belt at over 30,000 feet there is enough altitude to recover a plane from the stall, so even if the plane stalled, that in itself does not explain the loss of the plane. , so the critical situation The question is what other factors could have been at play and to investigate fully we need to look inside the cabin. Experienced pilot Captain Jean Maeín is flying an Airbus A320 flight simulator, an exact replica of the lost plane.

The reason we try to simulate what happened. In an accident or incident it is to learn and if we can take advantage of that information to prevent it from happening again and also discover its weaknesses in the system that can lead us to difficult areas, every reading that we see, every indicator that we see will be exactly what AirAsia tells us. pilots would have seen for all pilots, accurate instrument displays are vital, all aircraft are designed in such a way that they give you information and it is our job and our profession to identify that information and prioritize the instruments, it is everything and yet , you ignore them at your own risk.

If you have a fault in the instrument, you have to be able to recognize it. If you follow a faulty instrument then you can cause the plane to lose control and at that point anything can happen. This simulator has been programmed to reproduce an instrument failure while ascending from 32,000. feet the air bright and reliable turning Samba is indicating well 72.7 the pilot was quick to identify the fault here is an unreliable speed indicator flight directors out birdies up recognizing the fault the crew turns off some of the autopilot protection which returns the main controls to the crew a checklist the seat belt is checked then they turn off the computers related to the faulty speed indicators seconds later this happens a theft warning is an indication that you are entering an environment where you are about of losing your wing lip in an attempt to recover from a possible stall John lowers the nose to gain speed and falls 5,000 feet then levels off level three seventy in this case John successfully recovers the plains in the case of the AirAsia flight we know that the Airbus 320 climbed rapidly and probably stopped at 38,000 feet;

We also know that faulty instruments contributed to another tragic Airbus disaster and another loss five years earlier. On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 was en route from Rio to Paris with 237 passengers and crew on board at 2:10 a.m. The Airbus 330 disappeared from the radar of a Tajik neighbor. It took two years before the flight's black box was found and its secrets were finally revealed. Colleen Keller is an air traffic investigator who worked on the search for Air France 447 for similarities to the crash. from AirAsia are amazing there was bad weather right around the tropical conversion zone right at the equator the initial malfunction was caused by the computer shutting down in place of the plane there are metal cylinders that measure air speed they are called pitot tubes The researchers discovered that the tubes had frozen causing the instrument's readings to go haywire, the computer literally saying: I can't work.

I'm confused and it turned off after the computer was turned off. The pilots were forced to fly the plane manually in a very difficult area that is very high. Altitude, these are some of the actual words spoken by the pilots recorded by the cockpit voice recorder. They had the throttles back and the nose up, so the two combined to make it start to go very slow. They removed the power because they thought. They were going too fast and that put the plane into a stall and into a steep descent, like a kind of floating descent unknown to Air France passengers, the plane had fallen at 10,000 feet per minute, most people were probably sleeping or trying to sleeping, there was a lot of turbulence the lights were dimmed and it would have felt that way during the entire descent.

I don't think people realized what was happening in the cockpit in front of unreliable instruments the crew didn't realize the plane was in a warehouse if they had the pilots they could have regained control instead they continued to fall towards the sea why they did that is impossible to know because we can't really get into their minds of the pilots who died there. The Air France tragedy highlighted the fact that Pilots need to have better basic skills. I think people were very surprised by the confusion in the cabin. People think that pilots are very professional, but they are just human.

Did the AirAsia flight suffer a similar fate? One thing we are looking at is Like Air France 447, potential problems with the plane would confuse the computer systems, which would then cause a very heavy burden on the pilots. Which could have forced these pilots to make a deadly split-second decision. The tragic final moments of Flight 8501 may have arrived. down to something seemingly harmless, icing is a very big concern for all of our aircraft. Icing can change the aerodynamics of the plane, but as we learn from Air France, it can also affect key systems, so freezing all the sentences about satellite weather may well be a problem here.

Data from the day of the AirAsia crash reveals incredible sub-zero temperatures in the clouds at the top of the storm. It's almost as cold as the coldest day in Antarctica, just -112 degrees Fahrenheit. This wind tunnel replicates flight through a typical cloud at a temperature. of only -4 degrees here a pitot tube is tested if the heaters that are supposed to keep the tubes warm fail this happens the ice blocks the tube which means that in the cockpit the readings that the pilots receive could be incorrect but without no suggestion from AirAsia authorities that these airspeed indicators failed remains speculation, the most plausible theory is potential problems with the plane and then how the crew responded to what the plane was doing when the plane fell from the sky there is in doubt, but what happened during its crash could shed light on the flights Final moments in the weeks after the crash there were reports that the plane had exploded before hitting the sea according to published information this is what we can reconstruct to At an altitude of around 38,000 feet the plane loses speed then falls, some experts estimate that at that point it falls at a speed of 20,000 feet per minute, twice as fast as in the Air France disaster, up to 24,000 feet before it crashes.

Cut all communications to investigate whether or not the plane broke up during its descent. Aviation analyst Jerry said Jackman is reviewing data related to the distribution of debris in the Java Sea. I think it's pretty certain that the plane went down in one piece. The pattern of the wreckage does not indicate any breakup before impacting the water, so we only have If we look at the wreckage itself and the telltale signs of that, is that yes, the plane would sink tail first and hit the water with tail force. From the wreckage it is clear that structural damage in the air is not a major factor here, from what we heard from the Copy Rush recorders investigators who until the last moment put all their efforts into trying to save the plane.

The official

investigation

is ongoing, but one thing most experts agree on is that bad weather was a factor in both the Air France crash and AirAsia crashes over the past 50 years, weather It has contributed to more than half of all fatal commercial airliner accidents, but there is a type of turbulence that does not occur in stormy skies and it could affect all of us, anyone who has been on an airplane at cruising levels flying. Through clear, blue skies, you will know that it is possible to suddenly encounter turbulence that the pilot couldn't see coming, so he literally blows out of the balloon.

It's called clear air turbulence, right now there is no electronic system on board that can see it, the pilot can. I don't see it, it's really invisible inside the pocket. Sudden and severe changes in wind direction have been known to cause structural damage to aircraft and have caused injuries and deaths. The shocking truth is that an event like AirAsia could happen anywhere in the world today. There is still no existing technology for controllers and pilots to ensure they do not fly in adverse weather conditions here at the University of Tokyo, Professor Suzuki is looking to change that, I believe air travel is becoming safer and safer, without However, we have to establish a new technology.

To overcome weather conditions, the creator's marks are invisible, so it is very difficult for a plane. You can change the acceleration and attitude of the plane. Suddenly, it's very dangerous. This device is designed to detect it. Behind this lens is a shortwave ultraviolet laser. It's a technology called lidar. detects clear air turbulence by detecting currents of water molecules. This is our lightest system in its prototype and this is an optical antenna and this antenna can receive the deflection of a laser beam in flight tests. This lidar system detects the range of moving water molecules in the air at a distance of up to 18 miles, the goal is to develop a more optimized onboard turbulence early warning system within a few years, so there is a future possible for us where we could see airline fleets equipped with this technology encountering serious turbulence is a thing of the past, a more advanced one is being implemented that will revolutionize our skies and could help prevent an AirAsia type accident in the future by tracking aircraft in real time when the AirAsia flight crashed.

Scientists around the world continued their research. look for solutions for safer and more efficient air travel in the future system it amazes me how complex the airspace is from the pilot to the air traffic controller many different systems exchange information and data our current technology is incapable of tracking all those planes while they are They move around the globe I think it was a shock with the recent tragedies that occurred that people began to realize that the entire Earth is not covered and that there are a lot of oceans and mountainous areas that are not covered.

It is estimated that 70% of the world's airspace. is out of radar range currently, what controllers see when planes cross oceans is a dot that was placed by our plane reporting 10 minutes ago and they know where it's supposed to be 10 minutes later, so there really is a 10 A one minute gap that is basically 80 miles away is because there is no real-time surveillance or tracking of that plane in the middle here at the Arian facility in Virginia, the engineers are changing that this is one of the most revolutionary advances in air traffic control since the iridium 66 radar. The satellites are being prepared for launch and full operation in 2018.

The satellite network will cover the world receiving signals from all aircraft in allparts of the planet. Transmitting information to controllers on the ground. Think of it as a GPS receiver on board every aircraft that broadcasts your precise location. in real time to air traffic control authorities by placing an ATS receiver on board each satellite, we realized that we would create something that was not possible before if this technology was available now, the mh370 would have been tracked better and the flight of Air Asia would have been found within hours, not days, with second-by-second information. Air traffic controllers will be better equipped to respond quickly to pilots who need a sudden change in altitude.

The AirAsia flight may not have been denied permission to climb to avoid a storm. Altitude changes are important. Because many of those requests are a function of weather, then when the pilot says he is over a particular point and requests to change altitude, the controller will have the screen to look at and the pilot will have a higher response rate from the controller depending on The fact that they share situational awareness Global flight tracking will make flight management safer and more efficient, but a critical problem remains: there is an unpredictable factor that is the cause of up to 80% of all plane crashes: human error.

I think the public wonders how safe flying is that people are afraid of planes crashing because accidents are so horrible when they happen, so many people die at once and they think about that, but really our aviation is much safer than most other forms of transportation, no matter how safe the daily flight is. The fatal Air France crash tells us that too much technology in the cabin can cause confusion. You have a highly automated aircraft and the cruiser sometimes has difficulty dealing with the complexities of the automated systems and are not trained to deal with an emergency. or a difficult situation when manually flying an airplane, our pilots become too dependent on computers, today's pilots have lost their skills, they do not fly the airplane manually as often as they did in the past and therefore when They have to do it, It's not that skilled at doing it and there's no doubt about it because practice makes perfect, but overall we're much better off with this automation.

The answer seems simple. More training and more experience at the helm. Everyone knows that pilots should probably fly manually more often than they do. are making technological advances are trying to keep up with increasing travel demands and make flights better able to cope with increasingly violent weather, but the families of AirAsia's passengers and flight crew have the hope that a tragedy like this will never happen again, they want future accidents of a similar type to be prevented and that is why it is vital that the causes of what brought down this plane are identified and, more importantly, that those causes have been acted upon. so that other families don't have to go through what AirAsia families have gone through.