Small quibble: The Straits Times is a Singaporean news outlet.
that dashcam footage is the most terrifying thing i’ve seen in quite a long time. good heavens.
Yeah it wasn’t really in a left turn, more of a side slip to the left, wing pointing down. I suspect the final death toll will be much worse than the current known total.
The fact that some people survived that at all is incredible. I guess the wing broke its fall a little without tipping the nose forward too much, and the fact that the river was there and shallow enough meant that the fall wasn’t heavy enough to completely destroy the plane.
Asian airlines though. A number of the crashes seem to be down to bad luck from the perspective of the airlines themselves (you can’t really plan for surface to air missiles, for example), but they’ve had quite a year.
Looks like the plane was in a stall and left wing stalled rather than being a controlled input
Hmm. Now I’m wondering what the cost (in cash, weight and fuel) would be to equip airliners with missile-detection sensors and countermeasures. Presumably automatically deployed; you wouldn’t want to depend on the reflexes of a dozy civilian pilot. Flares, ECM–are those even effective these days? I have no idea what the current state of the arms race is, and of course it helps that terrorists will often be using outdated equipment.
The Israeli state airline has missile defence systems
OK, so I guess you can plan for missiles in theory, but a number of these accidents seem to have been due to freak events that could have happened to any airline and weren’t necessarily due to particularly bad servicing, planning or piloting. On the other hand, I heard some pretty terrible things about the safety record of some of the regional airlines, so with the increased air traffic in the area some of last year’s crashes weren’t necessarily unpredictable either.
They do, but I think it causes some problems with the airports they land at (some have threatened to ban them from landing because of fear that the flares might start fires). And that system is I think only effective against short-range man-portable missiles, not against something like the Buk that shot down MH17.
This is not a wonderful thing.
True. The reports, and the Air Crash Investigations future episode, however will be.
Pretty high, and the opportunity cost of not spending the money on something else with higher returns will make it a double-whammy.
A better way to reduce civilian airliner missile-hit risk would be to deescalate conflicts worldwide, stop that proxy war nonsense, and get rid of warmongers in politics. And stop that business with uninstalling those secular dictators that aren’t useful anymore but keep a lid on the sectarian violence on their lands with borders artificially established generations ago without regard for actual ethnic/demographic situation.
Lovely. I’m going to be there in a month. (Frantically checks airline designations.)
Great, you’ll still make the time of post-accident increased safety/servicing vigilance, before the usual complacency and cost-cutting falls upon the maintenace departments like a dark blanket of impending doom.
Thought the same thing, too. That wasn’t controlled flight into a left bank, that aircraft was falling out of the sky. Looks similar to the B-52 that fucking imbecile colonel crashed at Fairchild AFB.
Insane dashcam video of the plane from the road it passed over (and clipped):
Great one.
Notice the slow low-altitude flight to start with, then sudden loss of lift on the left wing (hydraulics issues? flaps not down? maybe engine thrust loss?) and loss of control.
Yep - not much is going to stop a Buk.
