Flight QZ 8501 Ascened Too Fast

20th Jan 2015

Based on the initial findings, the pilot of the AirAsia Indonesia flight requested the air traffic controller to allow him to climb up to 38,000 feet in an attempt to avoid the storm in its path. Sans the indication of a looming danger, the air traffic controller (ATC) delayed its response citing traffic at higher altitude.

 

When he was about to send his permission to the pilot, he could no longer establish a contact with him and the aircraft had already disappeared on the radar screen.

The flight was flying from Surabaya on its way to Singapore on the early morning of December 28 last year. In addition to the 7 crew members, the plane also carried 155 passengers, mostly Indonesians.

The ATC received the request from the pilot less than an hour after the plane left Surabaya's Juanda International Airport. The aircraft's location at the time was over Karimata Strait, a body of water that connects the Java Sea to South China Sea, between the West Kalimantan (Borneo) and Belitung Island.

The aircraft, which was cruising at 32,000 feet at the time, was thought to have tried to avoid a big storm ahead when the pilot made a request to the ATC to allow him to fly higher. For having not received a timely response from the ATC despite the imminent danger looming ahead, the pilot must have decided to fly the plane to a higher altitude at abnormally high rate that caused it to stall in such an abrupt manner before its tragic fall to the ocean.

In almost one month of search and retrieval operations by more than a dozen teams from at least 6 countries, only 53 bodies, so far, have been recovered. Of the total number, 45 have already been identified as identification proves to be difficult due to the remains' advance state of decomposition.

Exactly two weeks after the search and retrieval operations begun, the flight data recorder (aka black box) was recovered on January 12.

Based on the ongoing investigation, the plane appeared to have accelerated its ascent to 6,000 feet per minute, which is beyond the normal speed even for fighter jets. Experts said that the average speed for commercial flights is only between 1,000 feet to 2,000 feet per minute.