Indonesian soldiers and rescue members carrying coffins of passengers on board AirAsia flight QZ8501, along the tarmac at the Iskandar airbase in Pangkalan Bun yesterday. The airliner lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on December 28, 2014 less than halfway into a two-hour flight from the city of Surabaya to Singapore. All 162 people on board were killed. – Reuters pic, January 20, 2015.Revelations that AirAsia flight QZ8501 climbed too fast before stalling and plunging into the sea point to "striking" similarities between the Java Sea accident and the 2009 crash of an Air France jet, analysts said today.Indonesian Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said the Airbus A320-200 was ascending at a rate of 1,800m a minute before stalling, as it flew in stormy weather last month from Indonesia's Surabaya to Singapore."In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal," he told reporters yesterday.That ascent is about two to three times the normal climb rate for a commercial jetliner, according to experts. Indonesian divers recovered the plane's black boxes a week ago, after an arduous search for the jet that crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are now being analysed, with a preliminary report due next week.While they stressed the difficulty of drawing conclusions without seeing the full black box data, analysts said the accident had strong echoes of the crash of Air France flight 447 into the Atlantic in 2009, with the loss of 228 lives. "The similarities are pretty striking," said Daniel Tsang, founder of Hong Kong-based consultancy Aspire Aviation.In that case, the Airbus A330 en route from Rio to Paris vanished at night during a storm. The aircraft's speed sensors were found to have malfunctioned, and the plane climbed too steeply, causing it to stall. As with the AirAsia disaster, the accident happened in what is known as the "intertropical convergence zone", an area around the equator where the north and south trade winds meet, and thunderstorms are common.'Phenomenal' climb The investigation into AF447 found that both technical and human error were to blame. After the speed sensors froze up and failed, the pilots failed to react properly, according to the French aviation authority who said they lacked proper training.Ignasius likened the doomed plane's ascent to a fighter jet, although experts noted that warplanes can climb considerably faster – 3,000m per minute when at altitude.However, Tom Ballantyne, Sydney-based chief correspondent for Orient Aviation magazine, said the rate of climb of the AirAsia jet was "just phenomenal", adding: "I'm not sure I've heard of anything that dramatic before."He said it would be unusual for weather alone to cause such a rapid ascent, but added it was possible if the jet hit "some bizarre unprecedented storm cell"."It is possible that the aircraft could have got caught in some sort of updraft that lifted it thousands of feet."However, while saying the rapid ascent showed that there was "something very wrong", Gerry Soejatman, a Jakarta-based independent aviation analyst, added it was too early to have a firm read on the cause of the crash. – AFP, January 21, 2015.
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