How long will it take before the transcriptions/analysis of the black box will be released to the public?
Didn’t it take about 6-8 months before something was released in the Air France 447 accident?
Possibly an insurance exec giving an initial knee-jerk reaction. BBC’s not reported that again.
tv news says evidence found of 6000 ft/min climb. that is way too much.
Preliminarily, I’m going to call bullshit on this. First, it’s apparently based on radar records and not the flight data recorder, and the guy announcing it said the rate was so high that not even most fighters could do it.
Modern fighters can climb at up to 10 times that rate, and this tells me the guy is talking out of his ass. The BBC story quotes the transport minster as saying, “I think it is rare even for a fighter jet to be able to climb 6,000ft per minute,” he told a House of Representatives commission.
I suppose that’s true if you’re flying vintage 50s fighters, though even the F 86 and Mig 15 could do better than that.
Didn’t the bulk of TWA 800 climb faster than that after the front broke off? If the report is coming from accurate radar data, could that indicate that something similar (structurally) happened?
ATC radar has no ability to detect height. Zero.
The aircraft transponder has the ability to send the aircraft altitude down to the ground ATC system via a separate coded data pulse sent to a separate co-located ground receiver. Which is integrated into the display the ATC controller is watching.
ATC has no direct rate of climb indication. What they do have is the periodic transponder altitude report. Which comes down every 15 or 30 seconds and is rounded to the nearest 100 feet. Given two reports and the time difference between them one can compute a vertical speed = rate of climb. But … depending on the timing of the samples there is a bunch of noise in the extrapolation of vertical speed.
But for any of that to happen the airplane must be intact enough that the air data source, the air data computer, the transponder, and the transponder antenna are all still on the same chunk of jet and are all still receiving normal electrical power. That would not be applicable to an airplane busy disintegrating, whether it’s this Air Asia or TWA 800.
An intact 737 can do a 6000 FPM climb even at altitude. After all, it’s going about 48,000 feet per minute horizontally in cruise. So converting 1/8th of that velocity into climb is not too hard, at least for 15-30 seconds. Sure, you’re going to be losing airspeed rapidly at that rate. It would certainly NOT be a normal maneuver.
But you can get that kind of climb briefly. And if you started at 34 or 35 thousand feet, what happens next after you run out of airspeed up around 40 or 42 thousand will not be pretty. It will be exciting though.
Yes but it’s unusual to climb like that and as you say it’s not pretty at 40,000 feet and even less so in the vicinity of a thunder storm.
The preliminary report is due out on the 30th of January. Expect relevant excerpts from the CVR and FDR to be in that.
I would expect snippets of information to come out before that.
CNN is suggesting the rapid climb was due to a powerful updraft:
**"The latest data show the AirAsia plane, an Airbus A320, was climbing at a rate twice as fast as it ‘could and should do on its own,’ CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo said.
"‘I think that means there was a tremendous amount of winds and weather,’ she said.
“If the plane was climbing at 6,000 feet per minute, Schiavo said, numerous alarms would have sounded in the cockpit. But if the aircraft got caught in an updraft, she said, the pilots might not have been aware at first of why it was climbing so quickly when they weren’t inputting that into the controls.”**
could be both. I don’t know about airliners but in a small plane one of the ways to mitigate turbulence is to pull up and reduce power. Easily done at low altitudes without any penalty.
There has been a little bit. A couple of days ago they’d only transcribed 50% of the CVR and were citing difficulty with a lot of background noise, warnings etc.
An airliner is much the same in that you would normally slow down to your turbulence penetration speed (though in some circumstances you may have to increase speed to get it.) However slowing down can be done effectively using power reduction and/or speed brakes/spoilers with no need to raise the nose.
Correction: 27th of January is when the preliminary report is due.
But:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/21/us-indonesia-airplane-idUSKBN0KU09X20150121
As mentioned some information has been released. What is your theory of exactly what happened?
I don’t have one beyond a loss of control of some sort. There’s a bit of information around but to be honest I’m too lazy to track down the source of the various bits I’ve read.
This plot has been bandied around a bit. It indicates some fairly unusual manoeuvres!
http://us.images.detik.com/customthumb/2015/01/21/10/181443_dataradarkemenhub.jpg?w=460
Why does this take up to a year? I can understand the need to be thorough but up to year is ridiculous.
The raw data, without interpretation, is useless to the non-expert. And instant-but-clueless experts are a dime a dozen for the news media. Which simply amplifies the ignorance.
The public clamor for a play-by-play narration for an investigation that properly takes months is really a stupid situation. Everybody *should *just wait for the conclusive conclusions. And everybody *should *want to wait for the conclusive conclusions. But that sure is not the way modern human adult children are trained. So I’m not holding my breath.
Here is a nice plot showing the debris field
If the 17,000 fpm climb is from the black box that’s wild. that would be one massive updraft or an elevator stuck in full up trim.