Doomed AirAsia jet’s climb echoes Air France disaster
22 Jan 2015 11:44 PM GMT
Indonesian Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said the Airbus A320-200 was ascending at a rate of 1,800 metres a minute before stalling, as it flew in stormy weather last month from Indonesia’s Surabaya to Singapore. “In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal,” he told reporters yesterday.
That ascent is about two to three times the normal climb rate for a commercial jetliner, according to experts. Indonesian divers recovered the plane’s black boxes a week ago, after an arduous search for the jet that crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are now being analysed, with a preliminary report due next week.
While they stressed the difficulty of drawing conclusions without seeing the full black box data, analysts said the accident had strong echoes of the crash of Air France flight 447 into the Atlantic in 2009, with the loss of 228 lives.
That ascent is about two to three times the normal climb rate for a commercial jetliner, according to experts. Indonesian divers recovered the plane’s black boxes a week ago, after an arduous search for the jet that crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are now being analysed, with a preliminary report due next week.
While they stressed the difficulty of drawing conclusions without seeing the full black box data, analysts said the accident had strong echoes of the crash of Air France flight 447 into the Atlantic in 2009, with the loss of 228 lives.
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