• Icy Conditions May Have Damaged AirAsia Flight 8501's Engine, Causing Crash

    As pieces of AirAsia Flight 8501 are slowly being recovered from the bottom of the Java Sea, investigators are beginning to put together an idea of what may have happened to the lost plane. We have already learned that the weather, quite obviously, played a big role in the demise of this craft, and while some question whether or not it should have even been flying, there were six other planes nearby that safely navigated through similar conditions. That seems to indicate that perhaps Flight 8501 had another issue, and an Indonesian government agency is the first to publicly lean that way. According to the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics, also known as BMKG, icing may have damaged the plane's engine, ultimately causing it to stall out and then crash to the sea below it. As it stands now, actually recovering bodies and wreckage has been a difficult task because of driving, monsoon-like rains and 12-foot waves in the search area. Searchers are finding what they need to, but it has been a slower process than officials would like. We also learned this past weekend that Flight 8501 never should have been in the air on Sunday morning. AirAsia is permitted to run the Surabaya-Singapore route four days a week each week, but Sunday is not an approved day. The carrier is now being investigated because of this and could ultimately be grounded for breaking this rule. The flight's black box, which contains the cockpit voice recorder as well as the flight data recorder, has yet to be discovered.
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