The
accident of Airasia Flight 8501
The QZ8501 AirAsia
plane crash was one of the terrible accidents happened in 2014.
The maintenance
crew noticed that the plane suffered some engine troubles. The problems occured
23 times in 2014 and the crew, of course, tried to fix the systems. In fact, on
the day of the accident the plane did not have permission to fly from Surabaya
to Singapore. It was actually allowed to fly on four other days of the week.
On Sunday, 28
December 2014, the plane took off from Surabaya at 05.35. At 06.01 the pilot
felt something wrong with the movement of the aircraft’s rudder. At 06.12 the
pilot contacted the air traffic control to request permission to climb to
38,000 feet from 32,000 feet to avoid big storm clouds. The plane had already
climbed before the permission was granted two minutes after the request. At
06.15 the trouble began again, when someone inside the cockpit attempted to
reset the computer system again, this time by pulling out and then reinserting
circuit breakers. At 06.20 the plane disappeared from radar screens and it did
not issue any signal. The plane fell down in strait Karimata.
The victims were
155 passengers, including 17 children and one infant and 7 crews, which were
made up of 2 pilots, 4 flight attendants and 1 engineer.
On 31 December
2014, the third day of the search, the first debris and bodies from the crash
were discovered. Officials later reported sighting five large pieces of
wreckage on the sea floor. Items recovered from the sea surface included a life
jacket, children’s shoes, luggage, an emergency exit door and inflatable slide.
Soon after that, the main body of the plane was also located and eventually
retrieved.
As a civilian
aircraft, the plane carried two ‘black boxes’: the flight data recorder and the
cockpit voice recorder. Each weighing about 7 kg and protected by steel casing
designed to resist water pressure in depths up to 20,000 feet. Flight recorders
are designed to survive a crash and being submerged in water. They contain underwater
locator beacons which meit so-called ‘pings’ for at least 30 days.
On 12 January 2015,
the flight data recorder was recovered and on 13 January 2015 the flight’s
cockpit recorder was found. Komite Nasional Keselamatan Transportasi (KNKT)
needed one year to analyze the data and finally in December 2015 it announced
publicly that this plane accident was not caused by the bad weather but the
plane systems which were missed to be fixed due to human errors.
Bibliography
BBC. (2014, December 28). Flight QZ8501:
What we know about the AirAsia plane crash. Retrieved December 01, 2015,
from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30632735
