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."
Can you imagine what you would have to do to get a 747 into a spin to begin with. Probably scarier than the actual sin itself....
Holy crap! Had a similar experience with ice/pitot heat failure in a Piper Arrow long time ago... It obviously ended much better.
“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.”
Oooookay.
Makes no sense. Don’t people LISTEN to themselves? Don’t reporters listen? Can’t SOMEDAMNONE listen?
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.
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It likely slowed to “maneuvering speed” to reduce the effects of the storm possibly harming the aircraft. At higher altitudes your flying “envelope” decreases.
True enough, but a passenger jet that size can lose altitude very rapidly. I think it only takes a couple of minutes.
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I’m in Central Fl ,, typically arriving jets at MCO start a slow descent at the FL/GA border and then when 10-15 miles out descend at 5-6000’/min ... COME ON DOWN! There is no reason to lose control to the point you crash and burn when you have 32,000 feet to recover in... I think this is another Airbus software failure compounded by inexperienced pilots... when you design an aircraft so the computer overrules the pilot(s) and then you put bad data into the ‘puter people die.
As the plane descended through clouds, the captain’s attention was drawn to the artificial horizon which displayed excessive bank and pitch. Because such an attitude is highly irregular, the crew incorrectly assumed the indicators to be faulty. Without any visual references (due to the clouds) and having rejected the information from the ADIs, the crew became spatially disoriented. The plane entered a steep dive at a high bank angle. Altitude decreased 10,000 ft (3,000 m) within only 20 seconds, a vertical descent averaging 30,000 feet per minute (150 m/s). The crew and passengers experienced g-forces reaching as much as 5g.[1]
Only after breaking through the bottom of the clouds at 11,000 feet (3,400 m) did the captain orient himself and bring the plane under control, leveling out at 9,600 feet (2,900 m). They had descended 30,000 ft (9,100 m) in under two and a half minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006
“and then when 10-15 miles out descend at 5-6000’/min”
No. It is EXTREMELY unusual for an air carrier or general aviation aircraft to descend at five or six thousand feet per minute anytime on a normal flight. In fact, due to slower speeds in the terminal environment, the vertical speed slows. Typical rates of descent on an instrument procedure vary from six hundred feet per minute on a precision approach to one thousand feet per minute (briefly) on a non-precision approach.
On April 4, 1979, a Boeing 727-31 operating as TWA Flight 841 took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, en route to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At around 9:48 p. m. local time, over Saginaw, Michigan, while the plane was cruising at 39,000 feet (11,887 m) and Mach 0.816, it began a sharp roll to the right. The roll continued despite the corrective measures taken by the pilot and autopilot. The aircraft went into a spiral dive, losing about 34,000 feet (10,363 m) in 63 seconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_841_%281979%29
It’s NORMAL here ... they bring them down FAST to about 2000 above the glideslope at the outer marker,, then you power up to keep from going through it ,,, at MCO you generally take off and land southbound , 4 runways , 2 17/35’s and 2 18/36’s ,, all 10k’ plus...
I had a EMB120 blow an engine above my house a few years ago ,, you could hear on the ground that he accidentally went into beta while at speed.
I think they do it so that the aircraft taking off have vertical separation ,, they turn a lot of them north after takeoff and they’re limited on the paths they can use ,, DISNEY WORLD has it’s own permanent “NO FLY” zone just to the west...
Culturally, they seem to lack the sang-froid you find in American and British (especially ex-military) pilots. When a crisis occurs and they have to start actually flying the plane, they seem to blank out. They are technicians rather than aviators, trained very well to perform specified tasks within certain parameters, able to handle crises in flight simulators well enough, but they often seem to get lost in their pre-programmed routine when a normal flight suddenly goes haywire.
I am a professional pilot. I fly in Florida. No, it is not normal.
The paths you refer to on take off are called Standard Instrument Departures. None of them have a climb gradient of five or six thousand feet per minute.
In Colorado, with mountainous airports like Aspen, minimum climb gradients are in the 465 foot per minute range.
But did the other pilots have 2 pitots giving faulty readings at the same time? TMR can handle one bad channel, but not two at the same time.
That was a great book,. I have tried to find a copy to read again, but it seems to be out of print.
I think some Airbuses have three pitot tubes. And the incidents have read about have been the total icing and failure of all tubes, regardless of how many.
Here’s an article describing a few incidents.
http://www.aviationtoday.com/regions/sa/More-Pitot-Tube-Incidents-Revealed_72414.html
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