To add to this: If anything comes out of the on going investigation that is of time critical importance to safety such as faulty parts, poor engineering practices, or crew procedures, that information will be passed on to those who actually need it straight away. Often when the final report is released it contains a number of safety recommendations which have already been implemented. The lack of an immediate (or close to) report has no affect on safety it only has the affect of frustrating curious onlookers who ultimately don’t have any particular need to access the report.
Wall Street Journalsays “more than 8,000 fpm” citing the Indonesian Transport Ministry’s statement about ADS-B data. But from the position plot that’s about what you’d get for going from start of climb to peak height in the time plotted so I suppose you could far exceed it at points in between.
Here is a Wall Street Journal article which gives the impression it may be something like the AirFrance 447 flight–where the pilots didn’t recognize/know how to recover from a stall:
it appears the Pilot deliberately pulled the breaker on the Flight Augmentation Computer while the FO flew the plane. It’s an unusual thing to do.
Did the plane go into an elevator-up configuration and the pilot was trying to disengage the computer? It doesn’t make sense but at this point the plane was flown into a stall by either the FO or the computer system.
Y’know, when that first article came out I did a GoogleNews search and was a bit annoyed that the reiterated headline was that it was the FO who “had the plane”, rather than that there was some problem with the stall systems and the next step is to figure what/why. Now we have the info that he had the plane while the CO was apparently trying to hard-reboot.
I haven’t heard anything that said the stall indicator system(s) didn’t work. But for the Captain to pull the breaker on the FAC it means resetting it didn’t do what it was suppose to do.
If I understand the Airbus system it’s set up so that the first input is the one recognized and the alternate is ignored. So if the FO’s stick was pulled all the way back (full up elevator) then the captain’s stick would be ignored. if the FO’s was giving a false signal and the Captain’s input was ignored then it would make sense to disable “something” but I’m not sure what.
First, I’d wait for the FDR data before taking any climb rates as gospel.
Second, yes you can obtain very high rates of climb, briefly. If you are toodling along at 450 knots and then pull the stick back and pitch the nose up abruptly, the initial rate of climb will be very high but it will quickly drop off and unless you lower the nose to a more sensible attitude you will slow down and stall.
Interesting question. But just to correct one detail: I believe that plane was in a pitch-up stall most of the way down, until the just-awakened head pilot took charge and (IIRC) finally understood what should have been done minutes before, and pitched down just for the last thousand feet or so.
The critical component in a plan going supersonic is the elevator. The pressure wave moves back and locks it in position. The fix for that is an adjustable horizontal tail plane Which a 777 has. So my wag is that it’s still controllable with trim.
I’ve never really paid much attention but I think most airliners have that type of setup.
Sure it could. Jets accelerate very quickly when you point the nose down.
PSA1771 was a BAe146 that is thought to have hit the ground in a 70º dive, and faster than the speed of sound at 770mph. It reached that from a cruise altitude of 22,000’ and the 146 is a very slow jet compared to your typical Boeing or Airbus. It has a relatively straight wing and no high speed devices such as mach trimmers or flying tailplanes.
It disintegrated, though enough bits were found to figure out what had happened.
Getting sonic in a big jet is easy. Surviving doing so is not.
Tailplane trim as pointed out by Magiver *might *be enough to salvage a gentle descent caught just barely past Mach 1. The trim drive mechanism is not powerful enough to deal with the air loads much past that. Getting the nose buried is often a one-way move; you’re usually past the point of no return even before the speed gets ludicrous.
What tends to happen then is big parts shed in the low to mid 20 thousand foot range. At which point much of what remains is less aerodynamic and falls more slowly. So you still have plenty of big chunks, but they’re spread out over a multi-square mile area when they re-arrive on Earth.
Pan Am 103, TWA 800, and the more recent MH17 shoot-down over Ukraine are good examples of what the wreckage looks like when the airplane come unglued at altitude. A handful of big 20-40’ chunks, thousands of 3-5’ chunks, and lots of confetti. Most of the confetti won’t be recovered even for a land impact. At sea even less will be recovered.
Actually a few airliners have gone past Mach 1 and landed in one piece… OK, minus a few pieces in some cases.
I searched because I thought it was a Convair 990 that had gone supersonic on purpose during test flights, but it turned out it was a DC-8.
