Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182, a Boeing 737, has disappeared from radar

https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1347856317839417345

by blacktulip • 6 years ago

260 137 6 years ago

twitter.com

arnon• 6 years ago

26 year old 737-500. Weather is pretty bad in the area right now.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Not a 737 Max, just to be clear

tareqak• 6 years ago

It might be worth adding that to the post title somehow e.g. 737 (not Max).

postingawayonhn• 6 years ago

The weather looks pretty calm in the pictures of the debris.

rurban2• 6 years ago

It was only raining. No storm or such.

Erlich_Bachman• 6 years ago

A well-maintained airplane can work for many more years than this. They are not like cars. All the important functional parts are being replaced regularly and the structure of the frame is checked and repaired if needed.

dopamean• 6 years ago

A car could work this way too.

temporallobe• 6 years ago

Indeed, a regularly maintained older aircraft is a virtual Ship of Theseus.

Aloha• 6 years ago

A well maintained car can outlast an airplane ;-)

BoorishBears• 6 years ago

The airline has constant safety complaints and was a week away from losing the ability to fly over safety concerns some time in the last year

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2019-1...

jmnicolas• 6 years ago

Yes if I'm not mistaken B52 bombers are at least twice this age!

dehrmann4• 6 years ago

You're still subject to max pressurization cycles, though.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

Average flight length matters. The airframe wears out based on pressurization and depressurization cycles, not just age or flight hours. Planes associated with short hop routes tend to wear out faster.

ffpip• 6 years ago

Sriwijaya Air flight #SJ182 lost more than 10.000 feet of altitude in less than one minute, about 4 minutes after departure from Jakarta.

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1347850078644563969

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/pk-clc#26860e0e

K0balt• 6 years ago

Wow. that rate of descent, and so shortly after takeoff (no time/altutude for hypoxia, etc) points strongly to a major structural failure or at least a catastrophic failure of flight control systems.

In that phase of flight, pressurization would be just starting to build, I wonder how many cycles that 26 year old airframe has on it?

Also, is it known if there was anyone of major political or financial consequence on board? Getting to that altitude is also a common trigger for barometric switches.

Reason0774• 6 years ago

Suicide by pilot is another possibility. It's certainly happened before (SilkAir 185, EgyptAir 990, Germanwings 9525, possibly Malaysian 370)

wp381640• 6 years ago

25+ yo airframe, Island hopping, budget airline, Indonesia

All points to fuselage maintenance

asd42324• 6 years ago

If the weather was bad it could also be caused by a pilot getting disoriented, or perhaps an instrument failure. Plenty of aircraft with perfectly working flight controls have been nosedived to the ground either due to spatial disorientation, or pilots believing a faulty attitude indicator.

Of course suicide is another possibility in such cases.

TedShiller• 6 years ago

True. That happened to Atlas-Air 3591. Investigation conclusion was basically bad pilot.

helsinkiandrew• 6 years ago

If the flightradar route ends where it crashed (and it wasn't just when the ADS was turned off) then that is only in 15-20M of water so wreckage and black box will be retrievable.

damniatx• 6 years ago

They found the debris

https://twitter.com/HZLABZ/status/1347859200135868418?s=19

kjakm• 6 years ago

Anything to back this up? The account tweeting it seems unrelated to the people in the images and I can’t see a source.

raihansaputra2• 6 years ago

The video is making rounds. Seems like it's legit, the Basarnas (Indonesian National SAR) and KNKT (Indonesia's NTSB) is still confirming the findings.

rurban2• 6 years ago

If you read the proper news, ie avherald, you will read that two fisher boats were 5nm from the crash site. They heard two explosions, saw the parts falling down, went there, picked up the debris. One stayed there, in shallow water, easy to check the cause of the explisions, the other went 2hrs to report to police. A bomb is very unlikely, lots of better explanations. We'll see.

bdz• 6 years ago

http://avherald.com/h?article=4e18553c&opt=0

fblp• 6 years ago

Very informative article, thank you ^ "The water is about 15 to 16 meters deep at the crash site“ Although this is tragic, the relatively shallow water will make this a faster cleanup and investigation compared to other recent crashes.

United857• 6 years ago

Mods can we change the link to this avherald page instead of a tweet which is just a headline?

refurb• 6 years ago

Wow. Considering most airlines are operating at >20% of normal volume it’s amazing we’d see a crash right now.

siva7• 6 years ago

Operating at such a low volume introduces other problems similiar like surgeons doing too few procedures and therefore not gaining enough routine

rdgthree• 6 years ago

Is this just an assumption? It's an interesting thought, I'm curious if there's some sort of data to back it up.

blantonl• 6 years ago

Also their equipment sitting idle

overscore2• 6 years ago

Yeah. I am a SAR medic and due to rolling lockdowns, was only able to get to sea for training about 10% of the norm last year (4 times vs ~40 in 2019). The same is true for clinical placements (0 vs 4), classroom training (2 vs ~50), etc.

They're all perishable skills and it's left me rusty on everything from boat handling to nav to CPR (BLS is an extremely perishable skill - used to do BLS refreshers every two weeks). On call outs, I can the difference in all the crew - even those on the job for decades. Things just aren't as smooth.

I can't wait to get vaccinated and back into training. Otherwise, I worry we're going to start making mistakes.

manojlds2• 6 years ago

A reason why I have been avoiding restaurant foods here in India due to covid - it's not because of covid per se, but due to possible other cuts being done due to lower volumes and I just can't rely on quality of food.

mrandish• 6 years ago

Agreed. This is an under-appreciated impact of widespread, long-term lockdowns. It disrupts basically everything in both obvious and non-obvious ways ranging from subtle to severe.

I've been reading some concerning analyses by supply chain experts documenting the increasing stresses and failures in supply chains throughout the economy. Basically, you can't change this much, this fast, across so many interlinked systems and not cause significant unexpected failures.

chrononaut• 6 years ago

Interestingly even though there have been a significant decrease in the number of flights and passengers flying, the number of absolute fatalities was higher in 2020 than 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55515525

woutr_be• 6 years ago

2020 did have fewer accidents than 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...), with a major accident early January. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...

And most accidents happened before June, which was still relatively early on in the pandemic.

Recursing• 6 years ago

As the article says, 176 out of the 299 fatalities in 2020 were due to the "shooting down of a Ukraine International Airlines flight by Iranian armed forces last January". So that's the only reason

marcyb5st• 6 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me if to save some money airlines become more lenient in maintenance. Especially in less regulated airspaces.

Not saying this is the reason of the crash, but just it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.

VLM2• 6 years ago

Beancounters have always been complaining about beans, but for the first time in aviation history (well, maybe a couple weeks around 9/11) operations is not driving maintenance insane with demands to keep em in the air.

There is a valid counter argument that planes are built to fly and nothing seems to attract problems like hanger queens that just sit there. Seals dry out, birds nest, corrosion is arguably worse on the ground that on flying planes...

Its interesting that the linked airline has no documented google-able history of maintenance related problems, but their pilots have repeatedly historically done some real cowboy stuff like land at the wrong airport and several episodes of "the weather isn't really that bad" turning out to be vastly optimistic. I would guess past performance predicting future performance would indicate it is much more likely to be an operations failure rather than maint...

elwell• 6 years ago

Do you mean '<'?

raffraffraff• 6 years ago

I know two pilots in their 50s (husband and wife, who met through their work). Because of covid, they're back in flight simulators. For them, it's very very weird to be in a simulator unless it's for extreme scenarios like zero visibility, treacherous wind, engine failure etc. He's had a handful of flights in the last few months so his licence is ok, but she's got to fly as co-pilot for a while because she hasn't flown for 3 months. There's a critical mass issue though... If an airline doesn't have enough pilots who can fly, it takes a while for the rest to get the co-pilot fly time. So now she's in the simulator, and the instruction is simply "Take off from London, touch down in Dublin".

I thought it was like riding a bicycle - you don't forget. While that's true to an extent, I was told that you do "lose your edge" without constant practice. (I'm sure every developer knows what is like to go back to a language after a year of not using it).

I'm not suggesting that it's a factor here, just wanted to give a different angle to the low flight volume.

dehrmann4• 6 years ago

I don't feel like I'm as good of a driver after only driving a few miles per week. I can do it, but I definitely feel a little out of practice.

dmitrygr• 6 years ago

It is not like riding a bike at all. A few weeks of not flying, and I notice my landings getting sloppier and less smooth.

mulmen• 6 years ago

This reminds me of Blancolirio speaking of “perishable skills” in a recent video: https://youtu.be/u19R0zfusiQ&t=14m30s

That was in regard to mid-air refueling but I’m sure it extends to other skills as well.

mysterydip• 6 years ago

The flight path shows a sharp right turn before the crash: https://twitter.com/omrockett/status/1347856795239292929?s=2... based on the curve before that it doesn't seem part of the scheduled path. Possibly manul course change or part of losing control?

Shorel• 6 years ago

Maybe the right turbine had a malfunction.

bluGill• 6 years ago

Seems unlikely. All airplanes can take off with one engine failed, and pilots generally practice one engine failure situations often. Unless you are suggesting the pilots were poorly trained?

dirtyid• 6 years ago

After seeing images of passenger fleets grounded in storage outside during covid, Im personally reluctant to fly until air travel gets back to pre pandemic levels and all the maintenance kinks thoroughly addressed.

dehrmann4• 6 years ago

I halfway agree, but storing planes in the desert for a while is a pretty standard thing, so we know how to do this, and it's not like we're bringing the entire fleet back over a month; it'll be more gradual.

pierrefermat1• 6 years ago

This is plain stupid, do the maths and you'll realise the cab ride over to the airport gives you a higher chance of death than flights themselves. You can't just worry endless about low probability events

notwhereyouare• 6 years ago

During normal travel, I would agree. But planes are meant to be flown, not sit grounded like a large number did for 6+ months

crubier• 6 years ago

Not really. If my memory serves me right, Planes are much safer than cars in terms of fatalities per km, safer than car per hour, and on par with cars in terms of fatal accident per flight. Planes flights are faster and longer than car trips.

nobrains• 6 years ago

The area around Indonesia is the new Bermuda Triangle (yes yes, while noting that there was nothing significant or statistically significant about the Bermuda Triangle)

gumby• 6 years ago

BTW it's a 30-year-old airframe, not a recent 737-Max.

Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182, a Boeing 737, has disappeared from radar

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