{"id":206076,"date":"2015-12-04T13:45:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T13:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/crash-of-airasia-flight-qz8501-a-tragicomedy-of-errors\/"},"modified":"2015-12-04T13:45:23","modified_gmt":"2015-12-04T13:45:23","slug":"crash-of-airasia-flight-qz8501-a-tragicomedy-of-errors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/crash-of-airasia-flight-qz8501-a-tragicomedy-of-errors\/","title":{"rendered":"Crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 a Tragicomedy of Errors"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cost-cutting measures may have been responsible for the crash of AirAsia flight QZ8501. Pictured: an AirAsia Airbus A320-216 like the one that crashed. (Photo: Kentaro Lemoto)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Last December, <\/span>AirAsia flight QZ8501<\/span> crashed into the Java Sea killing 155 passengers and seven crew members. Indonesia\u2019s National Transportation Safety Commission has finally determined the causes. <\/span>In the <\/span>Guardian,<\/span><\/i> Kate Lamb<\/span><\/a> explains that an electrical interruption to <\/span>the Rudder Travel Limiter (RTL), \u201chappened three times in the space of thirteen minutes, eventually causing the autopilot to disengage.\u201d Thus the co-pilot was at the controls. That\u2019s when the problems begun to compound. Lamb:<\/span><\/p>\n

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According to information gleaned from two black boxes and a cockpit recording, the pilot instructed the co-pilot to \u201cpull down\u201d, an order that was taken literally, sending the plane soaring up to 38,000 feet, at a rate of 20,000 feet per second. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[The pilot] said, \u2018Pull down, pull down.\u2019 But when you pull down [the gear controls] the plane goes up. To make the plane go down you need to push, so this order was confusing,\u201d said accident investigator Nurcahyo Utomo.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The pilot, no doubt harried or even panicked, was using the terminology to ascend to tell the co-pilot to descend. As a result, according to the report:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2026 the plane went into a \u201cprolonged stall condition that was beyond the capability of the crew to recover\u201d. At one point the two men appeared to be pushing their controls in opposite directions, it added.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Unfathomable mistake number one: AirAsia let a plane fly with a faulty part. Lamb writes that the \u201cproblem with the RTL [was] an issue that investigators revealed had occurred 23 times on that specific plane since January 2014.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfathomable mistake number two: The pilot bungled the most basic of piloting commands.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfathomable mistake number three: The co-pilot didn\u2019t grasp that conditions called for a descent and that a steep ascent would stall the plane. Or, alternately, he was loathe to contradict the pilot.<\/span><\/p>\n

At any one of these stages, tragedy could have been averted. It\u2019s hard not to suspect that cost-cutting measures, such as repairing the RTL once and for all or grounding the plane, as well as more comprehensive training for pilots, were responsible.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This piece was reprinted from Foreign Policy In Focus<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cost-cutting measures may have been responsible for the crash of AirAsia flight QZ8501. Pictured: an AirAsia Airbus A320-216 like the one that crashed. (Photo: Kentaro Lemoto) Last December, AirAsia flight QZ8501 crashed into the Java Sea killing 155 passengers and seven crew members. Indonesia\u2019s National Transportation Safety Commission has finally determined the causes. In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-206076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}