Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182 crash investigation

[NeonNinja]

It's not about logic. More than the control factor, I think it's the primitive brain and its instincts such as apeman falling off a cliff, apeman getting eaten.
And once it bites you it's veeery hard to overcome.

Speed aside. It takes a few seconds of momentary lapse of judgement to be involved in a fatal accident.

 

[Gordon_R]

Indonesia Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737 'black boxes' located

Signals are detected which officials think show the location of the Boeing 737's flight recorders.

www.bbc.com

"We have located the position of the black boxes, both of them," said Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of Indonesia's transport safety committee, quoted by AFP.

"Divers will start looking for them now and hopefully it won't be long before we get them."

 

[koffiejunkie]

It had the opposite effect on me. I got into quite deep into simming a few years ago and I went down the rabbit hole.
It definitely increased my fear of flying knowing how little it takes to bring an aircraft down. Sort of like seeing behind the curtain. One improperly installed bolt, an unapproved replica part with poor tolerance making it into the spares, a piece of duct tape left on a sensor during routing maintenance etc.

You're kinda missing my point. Many, of not most of the ACI episodes are about crashes in the 80s or further back, involving much older aircraft. Procedures and policies have inmporved steadily ever since. The pirate part issue was a big problem in the US in the 70s and 80s, but they seem to have rooted it out. We also now have more sophisticated equipment to look for stuff like metal fatigue and hairline fractures, rather than relying on eyeballing it. There's a whole host of changes over the last 40+ years that makes flying even old aircraft vastly safer than it was in the old days.

I’m worried about flying again due to these planes having being parked at airports for months doing nothing and suddenly fired up and used.

Airlines are cycling through their fleet to do their current reduced schedules specifically to avoid this problem. Also, if the aircraft has been in storage for a certain amount of time (not sure how long), it has to be serviced before it can fly again - a very expensive business if you have to do it all at once for your whole fleet. So whether they're parked or used often, this won't be a problem either way.

That's nothing - I flew through the middle of a mad thunderstorm from Singapore to Jo'burg, for hours across the whole bl00dy crossing of the Indian Ocean!! Wings looked like they may "flap right off" many times, horrible experience!

I haven't been on a flight to or from the East that wasn't turbulent. And I live out here, so I do it often.

I've often wondered why they don't just change altitude and go above the storm.

On the route from SG it's not just about storms. You're flying through the Intertropical Convergence Zone (a.k.a. the Doldrums). Yes, this area has a lot of storms, but even in crystal clear weather, there can be an awful lot of turbulence. You pass through it coming back from Europe too, but you pass through at a much steeper angle, so you're through it much quicker. I suspepect it's also less pronounced over land. From SG and HK, you're going diagonally through it, so you spend much more time in that zone, over a warm ocean. Yeah, wild ride.

 

[genetic]

Many, of not most of the ACI episodes are about crashes in the 80s or further back, involving much older aircraft.

Ancient episodes, yes - but ACI covers all major recent crashes too.

List of Mayday episodes - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[koffiejunkie]

Ancient episodes, yes - but ACI covers all major recent crashes too.

Of course they do. That's not the point. As the crashes become more recent, the cuases tend to be more of either pilot error or some very unique lightning-struck-twice type scenarios. The pirate parts and shoddy maintenance related crashes are much less common now, even on older aircraft. There are just fewer crashes (per number of flights an/or per passengers travelled) because causes problems have systematically been make much less likely to happen.

Also, another trend with the more recent crashes is the passengers surviving, rather than complete loss of life. The Air France crash in Toronto, the BA flight losing engines coming into Heathrow, Captain sully doing a silky smooth landing on the river, The Qantas A380 suffering an uncontained engine failure. These are all the result of both aircraft design and the processes, procedures and training today that make crashes much more survivable.

 

[genetic]

Of course they do. That's not the point. As the crashes become more recent, the cuases tend to be more of either pilot error or some very unique lightning-struck-twice type scenarios. The pirate parts and shoddy maintenance related crashes are much less common now, even on older aircraft. There are just fewer crashes (per number of flights an/or per passengers travelled) because causes problems have systematically been make much less likely to happen.

100% agree - it's almost always pilot error. Was just pointing out that ACI covers all recent major disasters too.

 

[koffiejunkie]

Cool, we're on the same page

 

[Brian_G]

I haven't been on a flight to or from the East that wasn't turbulent. And I live out here, so I do it often.

On the route from SG it's not just about storms. You're flying through the Intertropical Convergence Zone (a.k.a. the Doldrums). Yes, this area has a lot of storms, but even in crystal clear weather, there can be an awful lot of turbulence...

...From SG and HK, you're going diagonally through it, so you spend much more time in that zone, over a warm ocean. Yeah, wild ride.

Pretty much why I have no interest in visiting the East again.
These days, will fly if I have to... maybe

Subject's starting to give me vertigo anyway so I'm done ;- )

 

[koffiejunkie]

Pretty much why I have no interest in visiting the East again.

Haha, I sleep right through it. The first time I flew SIN-JNB the turbulence was so bad I woke up from people screaming. Doesn't help that I was travelling alone, and sitting amongst a large group who was on their first flight ever. I felt a bit bad for them!

 

[Geoff.D]

Ancient episodes, yes - but ACI covers all major recent crashes too.

List of Mayday episodes - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Currently, e-TV is fiddling around between 3 seasons of ACI.
What is profoundly obvious when we see older episodes is how often the same basic issues surface no matter how sophisticated the aircraft or how new the technology is. The same old problems and issues repeat themselves many times over.

 

[Gordon_R]

A reminder that there were real people on the aircraft:

Indonesia Sriwijaya Air crash: Distraught relatives await news

Information is emerging about those on board the Sriwijaya Air flight that crashed off Indonesia.

www.bbc.com

 

[neoprema]

Haha, I sleep right through it. The first time I flew SIN-JNB the turbulence was so bad I woke up from people screaming. Doesn't help that I was travelling alone, and sitting amongst a large group who was on their first flight ever. I felt a bit bad for them!

I remember once after what I felt was definitely "moderate to severe" turbulence we landed and one of the pilots climbed on the business class bus with us. I expected him to be wet with perspiration, stressed, ready for a drink. I asked him, would he rate that turbulence as moderate or severe? He said "Our flight? no that was just to help stir the coffee in our coffee cups." I asked if they had to make any adjustments and he said "no, autopilot does a pretty good job of it and the only thing we might do is enter a new altitude if we've been given authority, but for negligible turbulence like this we wouldn't ask for a change."

I love the way he called it "negligible" while some of us were looking out the window to see if we still had wings! lol.

 

[Geoff.D]

Anyone ever fly on the Airline Air-Afrique up the west coast of Africa? A milk run that started in JHB, sometimes landing in Gabaronne, Windhoek, Luanda .......etc all the way to Paris?

We used to call it Air-Afraid because most of the time you wet your pants at every landing.

 

[Kelerei]

We used to call it Air-Afraid because most of the time you wet your pants at every landing.

Sounds like a normal landing at NZWN then.

 

[LOM]

I hear the jet streams en route to Japan can be brutal.
Apparently a Virgin Atlantic flight once did nearly Mach 1.3 over the US east coast in a jet stream.

 

[Brian_G]

I hear the jet streams en route to Japan can be brutal.
Apparently a Virgin Atlantic flight once did nearly Mach 1.3 over the US east coast in a jet stream.

Of course you mean ground speed, not actual speed greater than and within the jet stream.

On a flight to Australia once (can't recall if Sydney direct or Perth) , we were sure we worked out we had gone over Mach 1.0 in our 747-400 in the jet stream. Somewhere around a groundspeed of +1060km/h.

 

[Rickster]

This year has already gone to ****.

 

[Geoff.D]

Sounds like a normal landing at NZWN then.

Ja, one of the scariest landings ever was landing at the airport in Wellington New Zealand. The plane lands with all the passengers looking down the runway while the pilot does an extreme manoeuvre to straighten the plane just before the wheels meet the tarmac.

 

[LOM]

Of course you mean ground speed

Err... yes

 

[Grant]

Ja, one of the scariest landings ever was landing at the airport in Wellington New Zealand. The plane lands with all the passengers looking down the runway while the pilot does an extreme manoeuvre to straighten the plane just before the wheels meet the tarmac.

My cousin's husband is with air traffic control in Hong Kong (both old and new airports).
The stories make the toes curl - planes landing in cross winds...