‘Unbelievably’ steep climb during storm the cause of air crash?

SHIPS and aircraft yesterday hunted for the wreck of Air Asia Flight QZ 8501off Borneo, but bad weather again hindered the search for it and the black box recorders that should reveal why it crashed.

Officials said more than 20 bodies had now been recovered, along with pieces of the broken-up plane, in the Indonesian-led search for the Indonesian airline’s aircraft that is concentrated on 5 392km² of the northern Java Sea. Strong winds and heavy seas have stopped divers from looking for the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which plunged into the water last Sunday.

It was en route from Indonesia’s secondbiggest city of Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board.

“The waves could reach five metres this afternoon [yesterday],” air force helicopter pilot Flight Captain Tatag Onne said. “We look for breaks in the clouds where conditions improve so that we can approach. Yesterday [Thursday], when we went to collect a body from the sea we couldn’t because the body was being rolled by waves. Sometimes we could see it, sometimes we couldn’t.”

The multinational search operation based in southern Borneo was bolstered yesterday by experts from France’s BEA accident investigation agency, which attends all Airbus crashes.

Officials said the French team’s hydrophones – sophisticated underwater acoustic detection devices – and towed sonar equipment brought by other international experts could not be used yesterday because of high waves.

The cause of the crash – the first suffered by the Air Asia group since the bud- get operator began flying in 2002 – is unexplained. Investigators are working on a theory that the plane stalled as it climbed steeply to avoid a storm.

Given Flight QZ 8501 crashed in shallow seas, experts said finding the black boxes should not be difficult if their locator beacons were working.

The plane was travelling at 9 700 metres and the pilots had asked to climb to 11 600m to avoid bad weather just before contact was lost. When air traffic controllers granted permission to fly at 10 300m a few minutes later, there was no response from the aircraft.

A source close to the investigation said radar data appeared to show the aircraft made an “unbelievably” steep climb before it crashed, possibly pushing it beyond the A320’s limits. – Reuters