The tragedy of flight QZ8501

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