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AirAsia flight QZ8501 missing

The Indonesian air force says two planes have been dispatched to scour an area of the Java Sea, southwest of Pangkalan Bun in Kalimantan province -- around halfway along the flight's expected route.
Air force spokesman Hadi Cahyanto said: "The weather is cloudy and the area is surrounded by sea. We are still on our way so we won't make an assumption on what happened to the plane."
 
Sad news, but at least they have some closure now, unlike the other missing plane. I wonder why there wasn't a mayday signal? If the slides were deployed, it appears that at least some people attempted to escape. I hope they can recover the black boxes/plane to investigate properly.
 
davidsrsb said:
The pilots would have made mayday calls before ditching - it takes time to descend from 35000ft in one piece.
Ditching an airliner in rough sea is almost impossible
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You are assuming the radio was working, ditching in any seas is not ideal! But if it's your only option?
It was just a thought.
 
I read that the priorities at such times are
1 - Aviate
2 - Navigate
3 - Communicate

I guess that the water interface was breached before they got to step 3
 
Either way, not having the correct paperwork is unlikely to result in the loss of the aircraft. Air Asia seems, as far as I've heard, to be a responsible carrier, and the aircraft is modern. Weather still seems the most likely cause, as far as I can see.
 
Tragic event. The speculation as to its cause is pure guess work until the flight data recorders are found, really.
Lack of communication from the crew, life jackets, slide raft deployment, etc etc can all be for reasons other than the obvious ones.
Let's hope for the sake of the families that they find the recorders quickly & glean some hard info from them.
 
That sort of rate of climb is perfectly possible if the aircraft is caught in a strong updraft, such as would be found in a large cumulonimbus cloud. If the climb was initiated by the crew, the fly by wire system should prevent it developing into a stall condition. The fly by wire computers can be misled if the pitot static system is blocked, perhaps by ice, such as you might find in a large cumulonimbus cloud. So weather, or weather induced problems still looking likely.

Oh, and 6000 ft/min rate of climb is a bit of a doddle for a modern fighter, so I'm taking this report as rather less than definitive, for the moment.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
That sort of rate of climb is perfectly possible if the aircraft is caught in a strong updraft, such as would be found in a large cumulonimbus cloud. If the climb was initiated by the crew, the fly by wire system should prevent it developing into a stall condition. The fly by wire computers can be misled if the pitot static system is blocked, perhaps by ice, such as you might find in a large cumulonimbus cloud. So weather, or weather
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Remember this is on the equator, so the updrafts can be much stronger than you get in the UK. If the computer was trying to correct the climb and then flew into a strong downdraft, it would have dropped like a brick
 
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