The Presumed Crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 Is Nothing Like MH370

Daily Beast ^ | 12/28/2014 | Lennox Samuels

[SeekAndFind]

It’s been a rough year for Kuala Lumpur-based airlines, but AirAsia’s response to the loss of an airliner over the Java Sea has been miles ahead of Malaysia Airlines.

Darkness and bad weather forced the suspension of a massive search and rescue operation for AirAsia Flight QZ8501, which disappeared Sunday over the Java Sea as it flew from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Distraught relatives rushed to airports for news about the missing aircraft, an Airbus A320-200 carrying seven crewmembers and 155 passengers, including 16 children, one of them an infant—162 people presumed lost.

Singapore and Indonesia authorities searched the heavily trafficked patch of ocean between Indonesia, Borneo and Southeast Asia, as well as mountainous parts of the area where the plane dropped off the radar, before darkness and bad weather forced them to suspend operations. They said they would resume the search early Monday local time. Britain, South Korea and Australia also offered to help in the search and in any investigation, Malaysian officials said. Kuala Lumpur said it was sending vessels and a C-130 aircraft; Singapore also provided a C-130, and Australia said it had a P3 Orion aircraft on standby.

Air traffic control in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, lost contact with the Airbus plane around 7:30 a.m. Sunday local time near Belitung Island—about halfway between Surabaya and Singapore—authorities said. It was supposed to land in Singapore at 8:57 a.m. local time. The pilot had earlier called air traffic control reporting heavy clouds and asked to move up to 34,000 feet from 32,000 feet. Thunderstorms were in the area, according to weather reports. On board are 149 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Singaporean, a Malaysian and one Briton, the airline said. The pilot is French and the other crewmembers Indonesian.

[zipper]

They haven't really had much of a search yet. The weather was bad and visibility was low. The search was called off temporarily. There were some unconfirmed witness accounts of an airplane crash near an island along the likely flight path. As for the debris field, it depends on the type of impact with the water. AF447 had a section of empennage that was recovered, but as we learned later it impacted the water at a low vertical velocity, at less than a vertical downward angle. The debris field will always be down-current from the crash site, so the ULB will be crucial in locating the wreckage. The ULB is good for a couple of months, I think, and it won't take that long to locate this crash site.

[Sarah Barracuda]

Well I hope this plane can be found(Unlike MH370) these poor families..so many families wiped out..4,5, 6 family members altogether all gone..this is now the 2nd time a plane has met a watery grave

[MarMema]

They will never find this one.

They are already saying it is likely to be at the bottom of the sea and expanding the search areas, bringing in more help...this is the same story as last time and the ending will be the same as well.

One of the most pressing questions for searchers and investigators now is why signals haven’t been detected from multiple emergency beacons on the Airbus A320. The beacons, known as emergency locator transmitters, or ELTs, are made to emit signals to satellites upon crashing and last about 30 days.

Like the MH370, this will slowly fade from the news until it happens again.

[MarMema]

Beacon signals are often located within hours of crashes. If the plane is on land or in the shallow waters of the Java Sea or Karimata Strait, a region that borders some of the world’s largest islands and where depths are mostly less than 50 meters, the signal should be strong, experts said. “It’s very unlikely [for satellites, search aircraft and ships] to miss ELT signals, especially if the aircraft ended in relatively shallow waters,” said Mark Martin, chief executive at Martin Consulting, an aviation consultancy.

"Indonesia’s weather agency said cumulonimbus clouds rose to a height of 44,000 feet Sunday in the Java Sea, far higher than commercial airliners in the region fly. The plane was flying at 32,000 feet."

"investigators will ask why almost 10 other planes flew through the region unharmed at nearly the same time. Indonesia’s air traffic control operator said that of all the flights in the region Sunday morning, only the AirAsia flight requested a new flight path."

Such a good WSJ piece. I should post it perhaps.

[zipper]

They’ll find this one, soon enough.

ELT’s are made for land crashes, ULB’s for water crashes. ULB’s are less routine to find. Their beacons are good for 30 days, at least.

Once they define the search area and cover it thoroughly, they’ll find the crash site. The water in the search area is very shallow, with the “bottom of the sea” averaging 130 feet. This makes the search much easier, compared to AF447 (found after all the beacons were exhausted, with sidescan sonar, at 13,000 feet).

As for the conspiracy theories, I don’t subscribe to any of them (and there are many). I’m not saying you do or don’t, I’m just stating my view. Nor do I believe in “chemtrails”, another bogus conspiracy theory.

[Drago]

Victims found...presumably from QZ8501:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/12/30/air-asia-search-day-three/

[exnavy]

I stopped flying a long time ago. I do not fly for business, every time I get on an airplane I came away with a cold. Now that the muzzles have decided aircraft are a source of victims, I do not see the point.