Aviation Industry In A Hurry
"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."
"It can only be done by a fighter jet."
"The plane ascended suddenly, with a speed that was above the normal speed limit, and then it went up. Afterward, it (the plane) stalled."
Ignasius Jonan, Indonesia Transportation Minister
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| Purported AirAsia fuselage found in Java Sea. Photo: Facebook page of Singaporean Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen. |
Air travel in the east has grown at an amazing pace. As air travel became more affordable, greater numbers of people began using the services. And airlines began popping up to accommodate the need. To continue to accommodate the need pilots were needed at a pace greater than they could be trained. Many of the pilots have come from a military background. A background where fighter jets are more familiar to them in flight than passenger jets.
The pilots of the A320 that took off on a relatively short, routine flight on December 28 had run into foul weather after takeoff from Surabaya to Singapore. The pilots of the AirAsia plane, wanting to rise above the storm they had headed into asked permission from air traffic control to ascend above the storm, but permission was denied because of the volume of air traffic above their flight. It seems, however, that the pilots took action to ascend, regardless.
And they did so at an ascent rate that would be common enough for military jets, but which passenger jets were not made to accommodate. Airbus 320 was not an F/A-18 Super Hornet which is capable of climbing as swiftly as 30,000 feet per minute. Commercial jets are designed to ascend at a much slower rate.
This certainly speaks to the training that the pilots must have received while they were military pilots, and just as certainly speaks to the inadequate training they were exposed to when they switched to commercial piloting.
Data now reveals that the plane that crashed last month with 162 people on board ascended at an abnormally high rate, stalled, then plunged and disappeared from radar as it crashed into the Java Sea. In their last recorded contact with air controllers the pilots had asked permission to climb to 38,000 feet from the 32,000 they were at, to avoid threatening weather conditions.
It took all of four minutes afterward, for the plane and its passengers to disappear.
According to aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, the Airbus 320 was climbing at a rate twice as swiftly as it "could and should do on its own", and the result was catastrophic.
Stalled before crashing ... Indonesian
search and rescue personnel pull wreckage of AirAsia flight QZ8501 onto
the Crest Onyx ship at sea. Photo: AFP
Labels: AirAsia, Catastrophe
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, January 21, 2015
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