FALLING at 12,000 feet per minute | Indonesia Air Asia flight 8501

in the early morning of december 28 2014 156 passengers boarded an airbus a320 operating as indonesia airasia fight 8501 at ywanda international airport in surabaya indonesia they were bound for singapore's shanghi airport a two and a half hour journey the majority of the passengers were indonesian although there were also three south koreans a malaysian a singaporean and one passenger from the united kingdom in the cockpit sitting in the left-hand seat was the captain of this flight 53 year old indonesian irianto he was highly experienced having amassed over 20 000 hours of flying time nearly a quarter of which run the a320 he had begun his flying career with the indonesian air force having flown as a fighter pilot from 1983 until 1993. he then worked as a flight instructor and had flown for several airlines before joining indonesia air asia a few years previously beside him was first officer remy emmanuel plessell a 46 year old french national he had originally worked as an engineer in paris before fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a pilot at the age of 44. indonesia air asia was the first airline he had worked for and since joining in 2012 he had accumulated just over 2000 hours of flying time he would be flying the aircraft to singapore on this morning as the pilots ready their aircraft for departure a fault deep within the aircraft's electronic brain began to stir it had reared its head on several previous flights without serious issue but this time it would combine with a perfect storm of human error training deficiencies and miscommunication resulting in the loss of everyone on board before departure the pilots discussed the weather on route their route over the java sea was flanked by thunderstorms and was clear that they would be spending much of the flight dodging these as they made their way towards singapore and speaking of thunder this episode's sponsor is war thunder war thunder is a military vehicle combat online game played by over 50 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premium aircraft tank and ship along with the 3 day account boost at just after half past 5 in the morning local time flight 8501 took to the sky and headed northwest out over the java sea but none of the 162 people on board would ever make it to singapore what happened over the next few minutes would shock the world of aviation and would call into question such basic things as the role of automation in the cockpit and how pilots are trained to fly modern aircraft at 10 minutes to 6 that morning the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude of 32 000 feet due to the enormous clouds in the area and the outside air temperature of 62 degrees celsius there was a risk that ice would accumulate on the aircraft the first officer asked the captain to turn on the aircraft's anti-ice system so that the plane would remain flyable in these conditions the flight attendants also asked the passengers to fasten their seat belts given the possibility of turbulence the atmosphere in the cockpit was relaxed and the flight progressed as normal along its planned route nonetheless the pilots knew that this would turn out to be a busy flight for them they were approaching an area of thunderstorms which they would soon need to navigate around but they had no idea quite how overstretched they had become over the next few minutes suddenly the master caution light illuminated in the cockpit this was accompanied by a warning message on the ecam or electronic centralized aircraft monitor it read auto flight rudder travel limiter system following standard procedure the first officer called out ecam action which involved the pilots following the checklist which appeared on the ecam to resolve the issue the rudder travel limiter is a device which limits the movement of the rudder in the tail of the aircraft as it goes faster for the same reason that you wouldn't want to turn your car's steering wheel 90 degrees while speeding down the motorway you wouldn't want an aircraft's rudder to reach maximum deflection while traveling at cruising speed the ecam was alerting the pilots to the fact that there was a fault with this system and advising them to reset the computers responsible for it which are known as fact 1 and fact 2. fac stands for flight augmentation computer fac 1 and 2 make up a vital part of the airbus a320s flight computers as they're responsible for important functions like generating windshear alerts stall warnings controlling rudder inputs and calculating various airspeeds which are critical to the normal operation of the aircraft the pilots carried out the ecam actions and reset these computers one at a time using the push buttons on the overhead panel both computers then began functioning as normal again the pilots then turned their attention to the weather radar on the navigation displays they could see a big storm ahead of them and to the right the captain radioed air traffic control and asked to deviate 15 miles to the left of their planned route to avoid this thunderstorms are the most dangerous type of weather an aircraft can experience lightning hail ice and the severe turbulence found in thunderstorms can and has downed many aircraft over the years and pilots are taught very early on to give them a wide berth air traffic control approved this course change and the first officer turned the aircraft left by a few degrees the first officer then conducted the cruise crew briefing where the pilots discussed what they would do if an engine failed or if they needed to initiate an emergency descent from their present position they had decided that samarang back in indonesia would be their alternate airport in such a situation but they didn't make it far into this discussion before being interrupted again by the master caution warning chime the same warning had appeared on the e-cam for a second time auto flight rudder travel limiter system the pilots followed the ecam actions and again reset the computers one at a time once again the systems returned to normal functioning two minutes later the captain radioed air traffic control asking to climb to 38 000 feet from their current altitude of 32 000 feet he was hoping that he would be able to climb above the storms as he could see on his weather radar that at their present altitude much of the sky was blanketed by convective activity the controller asked the captain to stand by as there were currently other aircraft in the area which were above the flight again the master caution time sounded and the ecam notified the pilots that the rudder travel limiter system had again failed as before the pilots followed the procedure and reset the two computers fac one and fact two and once again the system returned to normal functioning this was becoming a nuisance to the pilots as a matter of fact this warning had been appearing and reappearing on this aircraft for months generally it only took place once in every few flights this was one of the first times that it happened multiple times on the same flight usually the pilots followed the ecam actions and the computers were reset by engineers once they were back on the ground less than a minute later the warning reappeared and the pilots reset it again shortly after this jakarta air traffic control cleared the pilots to climb to 34 000 feet but the pilots didn't respond the controller repeated this clearance and called the fight several times but he never received a response meanwhile in the cockpit the ecam warning had appeared again the captain had had enough there was over an hour left in the flight and he was determined not to spend at resetting the fight augmentation computers using a technique which clearly wasn't working a few days before this flight he had seen a ground engineer pull the circuit breakers for the flight augmentation computers to resolve this problem while the aircraft was parked at the gate he figured incorrectly as it would turn out that this would be okay to do in the air as well he left his seat and located the circuit breakers responsible for the flight augmentation computers the fac one circuit breaker was above his seat while the fact ii circuit breaker was behind the first officer one after the other he pulled the circuit breakers it's hard to overstate how quickly things went wrong from this point straight away the autopilot disengage warning sounded in the cockpit as both the autopilot and auto throttles became disconnected the aircraft had gone into what is known in airbus terminology as alternate law meaning that it had lost a number of computerized protections aimed at keeping the aircraft within safe limits the first officer was now flying the aircraft manually at 32 000 ft with a much more primitive suite of automated protections behind him but the aircraft was flyable the pilots had just been thrown back a few decades in terms of the automation they had available to them nonetheless as soon as the facts were disconnected the aircraft started a steep bank to the left without the flight augmentation computer to compensate for a tilting tendency in the rudder it was able to swing freely 2 degrees to the left this caused the aircraft to continue banking left for 9 seconds until the first officer finally noticed what was going on by this point the bank angle had reached 54 degrees this was closer to being on its side than it was to flying straight and level oh my god the first officer was startled when he recognized how far the aircraft had banked and he immediately pushed his side stick to the right to bring the aircraft back to almost straight and level but for some reason he did much more than just bring the aircraft back to level flight he had begun pulling up on the side stick bringing the aircraft into a rocketing climb the aircraft was now climbing at 11 000 feet per minute more than five times faster than would be typical at this altitude and perhaps spatially disorientated from his rapid turn to the right the first officer began allowing the aircraft to bank left again the plane continued banking left and as it climbed it began to lose speed rapidly the captain noticed what was happening and urged the first officer to pull down pull down but his phrasing was confusing the side stick can either be pushed down or pulled up the command pull down is contradictory in response to this the first officer continued pulling up and the aircraft continued its rapid climb as it reached an altitude of 38 500 feet it was on its side and its speed had gotten so low that it entered an aerodynamic stall the aircraft had gone from being a flying machine to a hunk of metal falling from the sky the stall warning sounded in the cockpit and stayed on as the aircraft tipped over on its side and dropped like a stone the captain started to use his side stick in an attempt to wrestle back control of the aircraft as an ex-military pilot he was no stranger to what is known rather understatedly in commercial aviation as an upset however he had not been trained to carry out the appropriate recovery procedures on the airbus a320 nonetheless as the plane fell rapidly towards the ocean blow the captain correctly tried to recover the aircraft by pushing his side stick forwards he was trying to push the nose into the dive to restore the flow of air over the wings meanwhile the first officer was doing the exact opposite of what he should have been doing rather than pitching the nose of the aircraft down into the dive he continued pulling back on the side stick in a reflexive effort to get the aircraft to climb the two pilots control inputs were averaged out by the aircraft software meaning that neither pilot was fully in control of the aircraft under normal circumstances when both pilots are using their side sticks at the same time an arrow warning players in the cockpit saying dual input however on this flight this was drowned out by the more urgent stall warning which sounded continuously as the aircraft descended both pilots were now making contradictory inputs on their controls the aircraft was descending at about 12 000 feet per minute more than four times faster than it would descend under normal circumstances as it was mushing down through the air the wings were rendered totally ineffective if the pilots couldn't get the nose pointed down into the oncoming air there would be no saving the aircraft but with the first officer still pulling back on his side stick this was never going to happen the aircraft continued plummeting toward the earth at terrifying speed its nose pitched up about 10 degrees above the horizon despite the aircraft warning them that they were stalling the pilots still couldn't quite believe that this was happening they were roughly straight and level but the altitude kept decreasing and the airspeed seemed impossibly low at one point the captain switched the instrument supplying him with airspeed information to a different source hoping that this would make the speed on his display look more normal but it didn't the incredibly low speed he was seeing was indeed the real speed before long the aircraft was passing through ten thousand feet and a recovery was becoming all but impossible both pilots continued their doomed attempts to save the aircraft until time had run out at 20 minutes past six that morning the aircraft slammed into the java sea with a vertical speed of over eight thousand feet per minute all 162 people on board perished instantly at first the cause of this accident was a total mystery the pilots had not broadcast any distress signal as far as anybody was able to see on the radar tapes they had simply entered a rapid descent into the sea and vanished suspicion fell initially on the weather this would not be the first time that thunderstorms had brought down an aircraft and the conditions alongside 8501's route were perilous when the aircraft was finally located on the seabed two weeks after the crash the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered and whisked back to the lab for analysis as investigators watched the data recorder readouts unfold and listen to the cockpit voice recorder a totally different picture of the accident began to develop than the one which had been swirling around in the media what really happened had nothing to do with the weather at all rather the pilots had responded to a warning about the fight augmentation computers in a non-standard way namely by pulling the circuit breakers this caused the autopilot to disengage which shocked the first officer into performing a bizarre maneuver which put the aircraft into an aerodynamic stall which the pilots were unable to recover from it's worth stressing here that after the captain pulled the circuit breakers which disconnected the autopilot the aircraft was not in a life-threatening situation in fact it was perfectly flyable if necessary the pilots could have flown all the way to singapore like this as such the real question facing investigators was not one about weather or mechanical defect but about pilot training and human psychology why had the first officer responded in the way that he did to the initial back to the left what could have possessed him to pull the nose of the aircraft up into a climb which he must have known would lead to a stall and further why had the pilots not been able to recover the aircraft from this condition shockingly the answer to that last question was that they were never trained to airbus had deemed that this training known as upset recovery and prevention training was not necessary on the a320 their reasoning was that the level of automation on their aircraft was supposed to prevent pilots from ever getting into a situation where they would need to use such training needless to say the final report into this accident recommended that this train become mandatory on the a320 just like it is on the boeing 737 and other aircraft and since this accident that training has become mandatory although even without having received this training the pilot should have been able to recover the aircraft in fact as far as his physical movements on the side stick were concerned the captain had responded correctly to this upset condition he pushed the side stick forward into the dive however he made a crucial error by failing to notify the first officer that he was taking over with the standard call out i have control if he had done this he would have been able to save the aircraft the investigators pointed out that he did however use the takeover push button on his side stick which should achieve the same purpose however he only did this for a few short seconds at a time rather than the 40 seconds which are required to transfer control from one side stick to the other as for why the first officer responded to the initial left bank in the way that he did investigators consider that he was so startled upon noticing the unusual position of the aircraft that he responded not with his training but with pure instinct this action was reinforced by the captain's confusing order to pull down which he may have registered as a command to pull back on the side stick as soon as the autopilot disengaged and the plane began banking left the atmosphere in the cockpit became one of confusion and panic standard procedures were thrown out the window by both pilots as they struggled to comprehend what was going wrong with their aircraft all while alarms blared and the aircraft shook from side to side if anything the crash of fight 8501 is a lesson in how quickly things can go wrong on a plane once training and standard procedures are ditched the total time between the circuit breakers being pulled and the plane impacting the sea below was just three and a half minutes the final report recommended that airasia improve their training in crew resource management basically teamwork in the cockpit it also recommended that airasia enforce strict adherents to standard operating procedures at all stages of flight in both normal and emergency situations as for the original source of the fault message which kept appearing on the ecam investigators recovered the computers responsible for this from the wreckage upon close examination they found that there was a cracked solder joint in one of the aircraft's onboard computers this crack had led to intermittent loss of electrical supply to fac 1 and fact 2 leading to them needing to be reset the final report also made a number of recommendations to indonesia airasia's maintenance department aimed at ensuring that in future reoccurring technical issues are investigated more thoroughly these changes will come as little consolation for the families of the victims but they are part of a never-ending series of safety improvements which continue to make the sky a safer place thanks again to war thunder for sponsoring this video click my link in the description box to play war thunder for free on pc 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Channel: Green Dot Aviation

Views: 873,810

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Id: BrBAvTpI2yQ

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022