Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501

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Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501
PK-AXC.jpg

The aircraft involved in the accident in April 2014 approaching Bali Airport.
Accident summary
Accident type Loss of control after stall
place northern Java Sea , Indonesia at 3 ° 14 ′ 47.8 ″  S , 109 ° 22 ′ 5.5 ″  E (last contact) IndonesiaIndonesia 
date December 28, 2014
Fatalities 162
Survivors 0
Injured 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Airbus A320-216
operator Indonesia AirAsia
Mark PK-AXC
Departure airport Juanda Airport (Surabaya) , IndonesiaIndonesiaIndonesia 
Destination airport Singapore Airport , SingaporeSingaporeSingapore 
Passengers 155
crew 7th
Lists of aviation accidents
Flight route map

Indonesia AirAsia flight 8501 ( flight number QZ8501 ) was a scheduled flight operated by the airline Indonesia AirAsia from Juanda Airport in Surabaya on the Indonesian main island of Java to Singapore Airport . On December 28, 2014, an Airbus A320 crashed into the sea on this route in Karimata Strait , killing all 162 occupants.

plane

The Airbus A320-216 with the serial number 3648 had its maiden flight on September 25, 2008. The aircraft, equipped with two CFM56-5B6 / 3 engines, was delivered to the airline on October 16, 2008 and received the aircraft registration PK-AXC. At the time of the disappearance, the aircraft had completed 23,000 flight hours and 13,600 take-offs and landings. According to AirAsia, the aircraft was last serviced as scheduled on November 16, 2014.

Crew and passengers

Flight QZ8501: Nationalities of passengers and crew
nationality number
IndonesiaIndonesia Indonesia 1 155
Korea SouthSouth Korea South Korea 3
FranceFrance France 2 1
MalaysiaMalaysia Malaysia 1
SingaporeSingapore Singapore 1
United KingdomUnited Kingdom United Kingdom 1
Total (6) 162
1 including 6 crew members

2 copilot

crew

The crew consisted of seven members, the pilots were considered experienced. According to the airline, the Indonesian captain had completed 20,537 flight hours, of which over 6,000 were on the A320 flight type at Indonesia AirAsia. The French copilot had completed 2,275 flight hours with Indonesia AirAsia.

Passengers

155 passengers were on board the flight on December 28, 2014, mainly from Indonesia and other Asian countries.

Flight history

For formal reasons, the plane should not have started on Sunday because the airline's license for this route was only valid on four other days of the week. On the Friday after the accident, the airline's ministry issued a general flight ban on the route that was the accident.

The aircraft took off from Surabaya-Juanda Airport at 5:35 a.m.  WIB (10:35 p.m.  UTC ) and flew in a left turn heading at 329 ° over the Java Sea. At 05:54 a.m. WIB (22:54 p.m. UTC) the aircraft reached the planned altitude of 32,000 feet and changed course to 319 °. Ten minutes later, the aircraft changed course to 310 ° before the cockpit crew announced at 06:12 a.m. WIB (23:12 p.m. UTC) that they would deviate to the left due to bad weather and asked to be allowed to climb to 38,000 feet.

Six minutes later, at 06:18 h WIB (23:18 h UTC), the last radar contact was with the machine. The machine was above the sea (over the Java Sea or the Karimata Strait, which connects the Java Sea with the South China Sea ) 103 kilometers west of the southwest tip of Tandjung Sambar on the island of Borneo and 129 kilometers east of the island of Belitung or 102 kilometers east the offshore Schaarvogel Islands (there Pulau Lung ).

Search and find

Six ships and two helicopters were used for the search.

On December 30, 2014, several debris, suitcases, an evacuation slide and numerous lifeless bodies were discovered in the Karimata Strait of the Kumai Gulf, not far from the Pangkalan Bun . Shortly thereafter, the Indonesian government confirmed that these were crashed passengers and parts of the missing A320. On December 31, the Wall Street Journal published a report from BASARNAS, the government agency responsible for search and rescue in Indonesia, according to which a sonar image taken by a ship belonging to the Indonesian Navy on December 30, 2014 could indicate that the aircraft was lying with the landing gear side up on the seabed in about 24-30 m water depth, about 3.2-3.5 km from the place where the first debris of the missing A320 had been found.

Despite the shallow depth of the sea at the place of discovery, it was extremely difficult to recover the flight recorder because the sea at the crash site is very cloudy and visibility is almost zero. On January 12, 2015, divers of the Indonesian Navy managed to recover the flight recorder from AirAsia flight QZ8501. This is said to have been brought to the Indonesian capital Jakarta for evaluation . The voice recorder was officially recovered on January 13th.

On January 14, 2015 around noon CET, the Indonesian Navy found the rest of the fuselage of the Airbus A320 with the wings, which means that the investigators cannot rule out a failed ditching . The fuselage and wings were badly damaged. 69 bodies have already been recovered from the water, but the majority of the victims are still suspected in the fuselage of the aircraft.

Salvage

On January 25, 2015 it was reported that the recovery of the hull had failed again due to torn straps. In the course of a further rescue attempt, the hull broke, whereupon the Indonesian authorities canceled the rescue on January 27, 2015 and declared it over.

On March 18, 2015, it was reported that the search for the inmates had been discontinued, and 56 people are still missing.

insurance

Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty UK (AGCS) is the main insurer for air hull and damages at AirAsia and thus also for flight 8501 .

Determination of the cause of the crash

On January 20, 2015, it was reported that the aircraft had entered an unusually steep climb (1,800 meters per minute) shortly before it crashed .

The Indonesian Meteorological Authority named the poor weather conditions as a possible cause of the crash, which investigators suspect (as of March 2015) as a pilot error or a technical defect.

In December 2015, the Indonesian Authority for Transport Safety published a report that blamed the failure of a computer system for controlling the rudder and the subsequent measures taken by the crew for the fact that the machine could no longer be controlled and thus crashed.

On December 25, 2014, three days before the accident, the captain deployed on the accident flight tried four times to reset the flight augmentation computers (FACs) on the same aircraft that was then on the ground. The error message persisted. A technician called in also initially tried to reset the FAC. When he did not succeed in doing this, he first switched off the FAC, then pulled the fuse for the control computer and thus de-energized it. This procedure was only allowed to take place on the ground. The error message no longer occurred after switching on again.

According to the maintenance documentation, this error occurred 23 times from January 2014 to December 27, 2014.

The error reappeared on December 28th, but this time during the flight. After the commander had followed the prescribed troubleshooting three times without success, he switched off both FACs during the flight and pulled the fuse to restart them. The report mentions that the crew may have discussed the consequences of this action, but the recording from the cockpit voice recorder was incomprehensible at the time. The report mentions that the 54 seconds in question would probably not be enough to make all the necessary clarifications ("Assuming that during these 54 seconds both pilots discussed the plan and consequences of resetting the FAC CB, the time available would not have been sufficient. ").

The flight control now switched to Alternate Law mode , the autopilot and the automatic thrust control switched off, and the aircraft went into a climb. The machine rolled to the left at 6 degrees per second. It took the co-pilot nine seconds to react; At this point the machine had already reached a roll angle of 54 ° to the left. In addition, after switching on the fuse again, the master did not activate the on buttons for FAC 1 and FAC 2 on the overhead panel, whereupon the flight control remained in Alternate Law and the rudder remained deflected 2 ° to the left.

Since the autopilot and the automatic thrust control were still no longer active, the pilots would have had to carry out the steering and thrust control manually. Apparently they were unable to do this. Misunderstanding instructions from the master made the situation even worse. So he gave the ambiguous instruction "Level ... level", which can refer to both the longitudinal and the transverse slope. He also gave the - in itself contradicting - instruction “pull down” several times. By “down”, the captain meant pushing the sidestick forward to descend, the copilot, however, interpreted the instruction as “pull up”, ie as pulling the sidestick backwards to initiate a climb. The co-pilot then pulled over the machine without the captain's intervention until the impact occurred a full three minutes later.

It could not be clarified why the master did not take control and did not reactivate the FACs.

Representation in the media

In the Canadian television series Mayday - Alarm im Cockpit , the accident was recreated in the ninth episode of season 16 as Deadly Solution (German title: Verschollen in Indonesia ).

See also

Web links

Commons : Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
 Wikinews: Airplane missing in Indonesia  - news

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Aircraft Database - PK-AXC. In: Airframes.org. Retrieved December 28, 2014 .
  2. ↑ http://de.flightaware.com/live/flight/AWQ8501
  3. ↑ a b Aircraft accident data and report in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
  4. ↑ Updated statement QZ8501. AirAsia , accessed December 24, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of January 24, 2015, p. 48
  6. ↑ Air Asia A320 missing in Indonesia - likely to crash. In: Aero.de. December 28, 2014, accessed December 29, 2014 .
  7. ↑ AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501. In: Crisis.AirAsia.com. Indonesia AirAsia , December 28, 2014, archived from the original on December 28, 2014 ; accessed on December 29, 2014 (English).
  8. ↑ Search for AirAsia aircraft interrupted for the time being. In: Zeit Online. December 28, 2014, accessed December 28, 2014 .
  9. ↑ Flight QZ85001: AirAsia in trouble , faz.de , accessed on January 13, 2015
  10. ↑ Airbus disappeared from the radar with 162 people on board. In: Focus Online. December 28, 2014, accessed December 28, 2014 .
  11. ↑ Missing aircraft between Indonesia and Singapore. In: The world. December 28, 2014, accessed December 28, 2014 .
  12. ↑ Aircraft accident data and report for flight QZ8501 in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
  13. ↑ Crash: Indonesia Asia A320 over Java Sea on Dec 28th 2014, aircraft went missing believed to have impacted waters. In: The Aviation Herald . December 28, 2014, accessed December 28, 2014 .
  14. ↑ Diduga Jasad Korban AirAsia Mengapung di Teluk Kumai. In: news.okezone.com. December 30, 2014, accessed December 30, 2014 (Indonesian).
  15. ↑ Live ticker for flight QZ8501: crash! Wreckage belonged to AirAsia machine, corpses in the water. Focus Online , December 30, 2014, accessed December 30, 2014 .
  16. ^ Debris From Missing AirAsia Plane Found. The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2014, accessed December 31, 2014 .
  17. ↑ AirAsia flight QZ8501: Little headway in search ops due to bad weather; 7 bodies found so far. The Straits Times, December 31, 2014, accessed December 31, 2014 .
  18. ↑ Sonar finds location of downed AirAsia Flight 8501. CBS News, December 31, 2014 accessed 31 December 2014 .
  19. ↑ AirAsia cockpit voice recorder found - Indonesian officials. BBC News, January 15, 2015, accessed January 13, 2015 .
  20. ↑ AirAsia Flight QZ8501: Cockpit voice recorder recovered. Officials hope outline of entire 42-minute flight can be captured. CBCNews, January 13, 2015, accessed January 13, 2015 .
  21. ↑ Chris Johnston: AirAsia flight QZ8501: four more bodies recovered from wreckage. The Guardian, January 24, 2015, accessed January 24, 2015 .
  22. ↑ http://orf.at/#/stories/2262570/ Recovery of AirAsia wreck failed again, ORF.at January 25, 2015
  23. ↑ Air Asia crash: Rescue workers stop rescuing the wreck. In: Spiegel Online . January 27, 2015, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  24. ↑ a b Search for Air Asia inmates discontinued. In: sueddeutsche.de . March 18, 2015, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  25. ↑ Allianz is the main insurer for the missing aircraft. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. December 29, 2014, accessed on December 29, 2014 : "'We can confirm that Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty UK (AGCS) is the main insurer for air hull and damage compensation at Air Asia,' said a company spokeswoman this Monday."
  26. ↑ Air Asia accident: Passenger plane climbed before it crashed. In: Spiegel Online . January 20, 2015, accessed January 21, 2015 .
  27. ↑ Panorama - AirAsia accident: alarm tones in the cockpit. January 21, 2015, accessed July 24, 2019 .
  28. ↑ Air Asia accident: Defective controls and overwhelmed crew responsible for the crash. In: Spiegel Online . December 1, 2015, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  29. ^ Aircraft Accident Investigation Report. (PDF; 15 MB) Komite Nasional Keselamatan Transportasi REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA, December 28, 2014, archived from the original on December 1, 2015 ; accessed on March 8, 2020 (English).
  30. ↑ An Incorrect crew response caused AirAsia A320 crash. In: Aviationanalysis. Retrieved March 9, 2020 .
  31. ↑ Aircraft Accident Investigation Report Airbus A320-216; PK-AXC. In: "KOMITE NASIONAL KESELAMATAN TRANSPORTASI. 28 December 2014. p. 106." The FAC CBs were not included in the list of the CB allowed in OEB and TDUs to be reset in flight. " 28 December 2014, accessed on 8 December 2014 . March 2020 .

Coordinates: 3 ° 15 ′  S , 109 ° 22 ′  E