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Flight QZ8501: What we know about the AirAsia plane crash

• 30 November 2015
• From the section Asia

Image copyright AFP/Getty Images

Image caption The plane crashed about 40 minutes into the flight                

AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed into the Java Sea off Borneo shortly after take-off on 28 December, with no known survivors.

The Airbus A320-200, carrying 162 people from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore, was just over 40 minutes into its flight when contact was lost during bad weather.
The Indonesian Transport Minister said the plane had climbed at an abnormally high speed before stalling.
Wreckage and bodies were recovered floating some 16km (10 miles) from the plane's last known co-ordinates. A total of 106 bodies were eventually found, with the rest still unaccounted for.

Last communication

The jet took off from Surabaya at 05:35 local time on the Sunday flight (22:35 GMT Saturday).
It was nearly halfway into its two-hour flight to Singapore when it disappeared.
The pilot contacted air traffic control at 06:12 local time to request permission to climb to 38,000ft (11,000m) from 32,000ft to avoid big storm clouds - a common occurrence in the area.

Officials said heavy air traffic in the area meant he was not given permission to do so straight away.
When air traffic control tried to contact the plane again, there was no answer. The plane disappeared from radar screens shortly afterwards. It did not issue a distress signal.
The AirAsia jet was reported to be the lowest-flying plane in the region at the time of its disappearance.

Weather on the day Flight QZ8501 crashed

The plane was in an area near the equator known for thunderstorms, where trade winds from the northern and southern hemispheres intersect.
Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-203 which crashed in the mid-Atlantic in June 2009 killing 228 people, was flying through similar conditions.
A report by the Indonesian weather agency said bad weather was the "biggest factor" in the crash.
Investigators have also said that the less experienced co-pilot was at the controls at the time.
AirAsia did not have permission to fly the Surabaya to Singapore route on the day of the accident. The airliner, however, was licensed to fly on four other days of the week.
The Indonesian authorities suspended the company's flights on this route pending an investigation.

There were 155 passengers, including 17 children and one infant. The seven crew were made up of two pilots, four flight attendants and an engineer.
Female flight steward Hayati Lutfiah Hamid, 49, was the first victim to be buried.
Nearly all the passengers and crew were Indonesians, including six of the crew. One of the pilots was French. There was also one passenger, Chi-Man Choi, travelling on a UK passport.
Read more: Who were the victims of the AirAsia crash?

Image copyright AFP/Getty Images

Image caption Relatives of victims threw flower wreaths into the sea in March as a farewell to their loved ones

Both pilots were described as experienced, with Capt Iriyanto clocking up 20,537 hours of flying time. His co-pilot, Remi Emmanuel Plesel, had 2,275 hours of flight experience.
Victims' bodies were transported to Surabaya, East Java, where their families identified them.

Wreckage found

Image copyright AFP/Getty Images

Image caption The fuselage of the AirAsia flight was found weeks after the crash

The first debris and bodies from the crash were discovered on the third day of the search, helping officials to narrow down the search area to 1,575 nautical square miles of the Java Sea off Borneo.
Officials later reported sighting five large pieces of wreckage on the sea floor.
Items recovered from the sea surface included a life jacket, children's shoes, luggage and what investigators believed to be an emergency exit door and inflatable slide belonging to the plane.
The fuselage of the plane, believed to hold most of the remaining bodies, was also located quickly and eventually retrieved.

Search effort

Civilian aircraft carry two "black boxes" - the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder - each weighing about 15lb (7kg) and protected by steel casing designed to resist water pressure in depths up to 20,000ft (6,000m).
Indonesia deployed a pinger locator to look for the plane's underwater locator beacon.
Flight recorders are designed to survive a crash and being submerged in water. They contain underwater locator beacons which emit so-called "pings" for at least 30 days.
The AirAsia flight's cockpit recorder was found on 13 January, a day after the recovery of the flight data recorder.
Both were analysed, and investigators said they only heard the pilots' voices and alarms on the recordings, which would appear to eliminate the possibility of a terrorist attack or an explosion having caused the crash.

Indonesia to release AirAsia crash investigation report

A part of the fuselage of the AirAsia Flight QZ8501, is seen in an image captured by the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) on the Singapore Navy's MV Swift Rescue, in the Java Sea on January 14, 2015. 

Indonesia was set to publish the results of its investigation into last year's crash of an Indonesia AirAsia passenger jet on Tuesday, the first official explanation to the families of the 162 people killed in the disaster.

The Airbus A320 crashed into the Java Sea on Dec 28 last year, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore.

It is one of a string of aviation disasters in Southeast Asia's biggest economy where rapid growth in air travel has overcrowded the country's airports and raised safety concerns.

The report, to be released around 2.00 a.m. ET, is expected to offer the first official explanation of why flight QZ8501 disappeared from radar, after the Indonesian Transportation Safety Committee declined to publish its preliminary report.

Among the facts released so far, the French first officer was at the controls just before the accident and a stall warning sounded in the cockpit, indicating that the jet had lost lift.

The report is expected to focus in particular on whether any of the airplane's systems were faulty and how pilots responded.

People familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier this year that investigators were examining maintenance records of a key part of the aircraft's control systems.

According to reports, one of the pilots attempted to shut power off to the intermittently faulty computer by pulling circuit-breakers, a procedure not usually allowed in flight.

Two sources told Reuters that the captain appeared to have left his seat in order to do so, but Indonesian investigators said in February they had not found evidence for this or that power was deliberately shut off.

Experts say an outage of the so-called Flight Augmentation Computers would not directly cause the plane to crash, but without them pilots would have to rely on manual flying skills that are often stretched during a sudden airborne emergency.

The report is not designed to attribute blame but to make recommendations to avoid future accidents.

AirAsia Chief Executive Tony Fernandes has vowed to support the investigation and said in August the group had already ordered a review of its systems following the crash.

Indonesia has seen two other major crashes in the past year including a military cargo aircraft that went down in an urban area in northern Sumatra in July, killing over 140 people on board and on the ground and prompting the air force to review its ageing fleet.

Its handling of the high-profile investigation may be scrutinized by regulators in the European Union, where a majority of its airlines are banned from flying due to concerns about safety regulation. Indonesia AirAsia and flag carrier Garuda are not on the EU's so-called 'blacklist'.