Posted on 01/21/2015 11:06:32 AM PST by Gideon7
Warning alarms can be heard "screaming" on the cockpit voice recorder of AirAsia Flight 8501 before it crashed, an investigator was quoted as saying Wednesday.
Among the audible alerts is one that indicated the plane is stalling, the investigator told Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Wall Street Journal. NBC News was immediately unable to confirm the accounts.
The reports come a day after Indonesia's transport minister said the Airbus A320, which crashed last month with 162 people on board, was climbing at an abnormally high rate before it plunged and disappeared from radar.
"The warning [alarms] kept on screaming, and in the background, they [the pilot and co-pilot] were trying to recover the plane," the unidentified investigator told the WSJ. "But what they said wasn't clear." He added that the flight data recorder also indicated that stall warnings were going off.
AFP reported the same claims, citing an investigator from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee, adding that the pilots' voices were drowned out by the sound of the alarms.
Minister Ignasius Jonan told Parliament on Tuesday that radar data showed the doomed jet was climbing at about 6,000 feet a minute before it disappeared on December 28. "It is not normal to climb like that, it's very rare for commercial planes, which normally climb just 1,000 to 2,000 feet per minute," he said. "It can only be done by a fighter jet."
From the description, this crash sounds a lot like the crash of Air France 447 back in 2009. That crash was due to the co-pilot's inexperience with flying the Airbus A300 without the computer. He was confused by the 'Pull up' audible warning going silent whenever the computer faulted at an extreme AOT (the computer shut up because it decided the sensor inputs were crazy). So he kept pulling up the joystick up and up thinking the stall ended whenever the audible warning stopped. Whenever he eased the stick forward the computer reawakened and starting bitching again about a stall. Rinse and repeat. And so he belly-flopped right into the ocean.
And in this new crash the plane shot up like a fighter jet and stalled right into the ocean. Hmm...
In AF447, the other pilot on the right was pushing the joystick forward, but the joystick on the left overrode him, and he didn't realize it. (Boeing uses wheels that are mechanically linked, so pushing one steering wheel forward always pushes the other.) The official determination in the AF crash was pilot error due to failure to understand how the fly-by-wire A300 behaved whenever the computer kicked offline and went into alternate (mostly manual) flight mode.
Was this before or after the screaming of Allah Akbar?
With heavy jets, once a stall occurs, can there be a recovery?
I remember at the very beginning there was evidence that the plane was flying too slowly, period, which would make a stall even more likely when it started to ascend.
I’m not a pilot, but that is the first thing that I thought of.
Denzel Washington did it in the movie “Flight,” so it must be possible. </sarcasm>
Depends on the altitude.
Yes. From the bottom of the ocean......................
Ok so nobody looks at the airspeed indicator anymore? A huge jet start to shudder in a pre stall and you don’t look at your airspeed? Waaa?
They were high enough (32,000 ft) to have plenty of time to recover from a stall.
In the AF447 crash, the pitot tubes for the air-speed incidator iced over and read 0. That’s why the computer kicked offline. It was a storm and they couldn’t the horizon either.
I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe the answer to that is “Yes”, if the pilots can get the nose down and there’s enough altitude to recover.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Industrie_Flight_129
“With heavy jets, once a stall occurs, can there be a recovery?”
Yup, given they’ve got enough altitude...which they did.
Civilian aircraft are specified to have designs that’ll allow full recovery...it’s only the fighters that’ll bite you back if you don’t sprinkle the magic “stick” dust very early in the stall. (Sort of an exaggeration, but - depending on the A/C, not much.)
Of course if you have enough altitude for a recovery.
Flying without an airspeed indicator is hard but not impossible. GPS can give you ground speed. Pretty close to airspeed if you know the current wind. An iced over A indicator is no reason to die.
I’m not a pilot, but I seem to recall the Airbus disaster a few years ago, where the pilot went to sleep and left the plane in the hands of someone else. Plane went into a stall but for some reason the guy didn’t react, trying “bring the nose up, bring the nose up.” What if you accelerated? Wouldn’t that bring you out of the stall? I mean you’re flying like a rock. How do you get the nose up or down unless you accelerate and therefore create some air resistance or wouldn’t the acceleration change the airplanes angle?
Secondly, recorder said plane climbed 6000 ft in one minute. Was that an updraft causing that?
That sounds like AF447. The captain was indeed sleeping at the time, then he came in and asked the co-pilot WTF was going on.
Right and the pilot on the right thought he had control when the guy on the left did.
What could they have done differently. I need to know incase I’m in that situation.
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