• Report: Locator Battery on Flight MH370 Expired a Year Before Flight Was Lost

    Planes vanishing in midair, never to be found, seemed like the kind of thing that only happened in movies until last year. When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, everything looked like business as usual until it disappeared from radar less than an hour into its flight to Beijing. The 239 people who were on board are now all presumed dead, although not a shred of debris has ever been recovered. In the early days the media made such a big deal out of it being a race to find the wreckage before the battery on the locator pings wore out. An explosive new report claims that, in fact, the battery on the locator for MH370 had expired a year before the flight was lost.

  • Indonesian Officials: AirAsia Plane Climbed Too Fast, Likely Stalled Out

    About a week after finding and recovering the black boxes from AirAsia Flight 8501, investigators are beginning to put together a solid idea of what led to the demise of the plane. It had been reported almost immediately after the flight went missing that storms in the area and bad weather conditions had prompted the pilot to ask to climb from 32,000 feet up to 38,000 feet but was initially denied. Indonesian officials are now saying that the pilot did climb 6,000 feet in just one minute, and that likely caused the airbus to stall out.

  • Investigators Believe Terrorism Wasn't a Factor in Crash of AirAsia Flight 8501

    Terrorism has been a major story over the last few weeks. Between the massacre at Charlie Hebdo's French office, the blood bath at the Parisian market and the terror sweeps in Belgium, it is clearly a frightening topic that is on everyone's mind. Thankfully, terrorism appears to not have contributed to the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 into the Java Sea a few weeks ago. Divers discovered the black boxes last week and have begun to evaluate the information they contain. According to Indonesian officials, they believe they can safely say that terrorism was not a factor that contributed to the loss of 163 lives on board the aircraft.

  • Divers Find Black Boxes from AirAsia Flight 8501

    Investigators in charge of finding out what caused the demise of AirAsia Flight 8501 a little more than two weeks ago have just retrieved a major piece to the puzzle. On Monday, Jan. 12, divers recovered the flight data recorder from beneath a wing at the bottom of the Java Sea. They also have located the cockpit voice recorder about 105 feet below the water, buried beneath wreckage. Divers are reportedly working to free that second black box from beneath heavy wreckage. Flight 8501 left Surabaya for Singapore two Sundays ago only to find itself caught in horrible weather. The pilot had asked for permission to climb to a higher altitude and, by the time that permission was granted a few minutes later, all contact had already been lost with the craft. Indonesian officials have speculated that icing may have built up, causing the engine to stall out and leading to the plane plummeting into the sea. Everything at this point is sheer speculation, but two things are certain, though. There were six other planes flying in exactly the same storm as Flight 8501 and they made it safely to their destinations, so this flight should not have even been in the air. AirAsia is permitted to run the Surabaya-to-Singapore route four days a week, and Sunday is not one of those days, so if they had been following their legal guidelines this plane would never have been in the air, let alone lost. Investigators are hopeful that they will get answers about what happened from these boxes.

  • Tail Has Been Found for Missing AirAsia Plane

    Finally, conditions for the search and recovery of lost AirAsia Flight 8501 have improved enough for divers to spot the tail of the plane. It has been located about 20 miles from the craft's last known location and resting at the bottom of the Java Sea. This is particularly promising news because if it is the right side of the tail, then the black box will likely be recovered with it. That recovery is crucial in helping investigators understand exactly what happened in the final moments of the doomed flight. "We've found the tail that has been our main target," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the search and rescue agency, said at a news conference in Jakarta. The tail was identified by divers after it was spotted by an underwater machine using a sonar scan, Soelistyo said. He displayed underwater photographs showing partial lettering on the sunken object compared with a picture of an intact Airbus A320-200 in AirAsia livery. "I can confirm that what we found was the tail part from the pictures," he said, adding that the team "now is still desperately trying to locate the black box," according to a report by Reuters. So far, monsoon-like rain and minimal visibility has made recovering the bodies of the 162 passengers on board difficult, and divers have been frustrated to know that they are so close yet have not been able to fully do their job.
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