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Debris, Bodies Recovered From AirAsia Flight 8501
Searchers have found traces of the crashed AirAsia Flight 8501, which lost contact with ground controllers shortly after requesting a weather-related course change. Reuters reports that both debris and some passenger remains have been recovered off the coast of Borneo, in a search complicated by waves "up to three meters high." From the report:
About 30 ships and 21 aircraft from Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and the United States have been involved in the search.
The plane, which did not issue a distress signal, disappeared after its pilot failed to get permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather because of heavy air traffic, officials said. It was travelling at 32,000 feet (9,753 metres) and had asked to fly at 38,000 feet, officials said earlier. Pilots and aviation experts said thunderstorms, and requests to gain altitude to avoid them, were not unusual in that area.
... Online discussion among pilots has centred on unconfirmed secondary radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might have stalled.
Well in the case of Air France 447, an additional factor was that the least experienced pilot was in control of the aircraft at the time. Another factor was the joystick control was not visible to the other pilot and the throttle position is not indicative of actual throttle amount (electronic controls). The more experienced pilot was trying to deal with the all the computer failures and assumed that the flying pilot was diving when he was trying to climb. It wasn't until the captain got back into the cockpit (he was on a scheduled sleep break) that the senior pilots realized the plane was trying to climb. They tried to get the plane to dive but it appears the plane stalled and crashed into the ocean before they could do that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The pilot did not try to fix the stall. He was pulling up all the time and even the dumbest student pilots know that that's the exact opposite of what to do in a stall. His (in)famous almost last words were "I've been at maxi-nose up for a while". For some reason that only he knows, he thought the plane was diving fast and that the instruments are wrong ("crazy speed" he said). In reality he first steered it above the plane's maximum service ceiling at which point the plane pretty much lost all its speed and subsequently fell down with a slight nose up pitch. The stall warning stopped when he pulled back because the plane slowed down even more and by design, the warning is not meant to be triggered when the plane lands and that was how low their speed was. A better system would of course somehow factor in altitude but then again, any pilot should know that something else than a stall recovery has happened if he's just pulled back. The saddest thing about the whole crash is that apart from the brief moment when the pitot tubes were frozen, there was nothing wrong with the aircraft. The tubes were heated so when they began working, all the pilots would've had to do was to trust their instruments. They had plenty of altitude to recover control of the aircraft and every instrument worked and every warning was correct. A display of shameful incompetence by Air France training.