so, another plane has gone missing...

What is going off? The MH370 story continues and now the air asia flight just vanishes? Scary times.

After the whole Mh370 saga you would have thought more would have been done to prevent this from happening. It's amazing that we can track a phone that has been lost yet we can't find a jet?

 

I bet you can't track a phone if you throw it in the ocean

 

Aye. On the day I'm flying to Singapore myself too. Not the best news to wake up to. Just waiting for connecting flight to get there now :/

Guess the odds of being in an accident are still relatively slim but to get 3 major incidents in such a short amount of time is definitely worrying.

 

Has to be an hijacking surely

 

This one hasnt gone missing like the last one. That simply vanished with no warning while this one was in bad weather and the pilot asked to change course because of that. Before he got a chance to change course it crashed. The last one went seriously off course and flew for a long time before crashing. This one was tracked all the way till it disappeared off radar presumably into the sea. It has gone missing because thats what happens whenvevery plane crashes, they disappear off the air traffic controllers screen. They never confirm a plane is down until they have visual confirmation of that, until that point it is missing and thats always how it works. The only reason it hasnt been found yet is because A its in water which makes it harder to find and B its quite a distance out so will take longer to get to with search teams than if it had crashed in donny.

 

An extremely logical explanation here as to what has happened :

AAP has spoken with an aviation expert, Geoffrey Thomas, who has speculated that QZ8501 may have been flying too slowly when it encountered bad weather conditions.

“Pilots believe that the crew, in trying to avoid the thunderstorm by climbing, somehow have found themselves flying too slow and thus induced an aerodynamic stall similar to the circumstances of the loss of Air France AF447 to crash in 2009,” Thomas told AAP.

The Air France AF447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 while en route from Rio De Janeiro to Paris.

“The QZ8501 was flying too slow, about 100 knots which is about 160 km/h too slow. At that altitude that’s exceedingly dangerous,” Thomas said.

“I have a radar plot which shows him at 36,000 feet and climbing at a speed of 353 knots, which is approximately 100 knots too slow ... if the radar return is correct, he appears to be going too slow for the altitude he is flying at.”

Thomas said this should not happen in an A320, a sophisticated aircraft, so it appears as though it’s related to extreme weather conditions.

“He got caught in a massive updraft or something like that. Something’s gone terribly wrong,” he said.

“Essentially the plane is flying too slow to the altitude and the thin air, and the wings won’t support it at that speed and you get a stall, an aerodynamic stall.”

The A320, while sophisticated, is not equipped with the latest radar, Thomas said.

The radar used by the A320 can sometimes have problems in thunderstorms and the pilot may have been deceived by the severity of these particular ones.

The latest technology radars, which were pioneered by Qantas in 2002, can give a more complete and accurate reading of a thunderstorm, but they haven’t been certified for the A320 until next year.

“If you don’t have what’s called a multi-skilled radar you have to tilt the radar yourself manually, you have to look down to the base of the thunderstorm to see what the intensity of the moisture and the rain is, then you make a judgment of how bad it is. It’s manual, so it’s possible to make a mistake, it has happened,” Thomas said.