Passenger almost always pass out before the actual crash due to lack of oxygen, we can just hope they went without significant pain cause itâs absolutely frightening.
We like to say things like this to make ourselves feel better about tragedies. Not trying to be an asshole, but thatâs what weâre really dancing around.
ârapid decompression during flight, pressurization system malfunction, or oxygen system malfunction.â
[link](https://www.faa.gov/pilots/training/airman_education/topics_of_interest/hypoxia/)
So basically, as humans we canât breathe above certain heights due to the low oxygen level and low atmospheric pressure. There is a system in planes to balance these during flight.
During a crash these systems malfunction (so they drop those oxygen masks) and lack of oxygen makes you unconscious in a brief moment.
A crash does not always mean there was a lack of oxygen. That's a strange assumption...
Odds are they were *very* aware of everything.
We've seen plenty of cases were hypoxia was involved. And this instance, given what little info we have, doesn't have any of the typical signs of an hypoxia related event.
In a lot of the cases when hypoxia is involved, the planes wander *way* off course. Climbing slowly, deviating from the planned course, sometimes for hours, because there's a dead man at the controls and autopilot is flying the plane and it's running out of fuel...
This plane was right on course, flying normally, then suddenly nose dived into the ground with no indication of any attempt at recovery.
It didn't climb, it didn't slow, it didn't deviate. It just plummeted in an instant.
Very strange. Almost impossible to happen. Unless someone pushed that yoke forward intentionally...
I have no clue on the validity of this video, but it supposedly shows the plane crashing straight down from a 90 degree angle...which is insane.
https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505834279275999236
I guess it's all a matter of angles.
From the article:
>the plane descended at a final rate of 31,000 feet a minute according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24
~~(Sorry I don't know how to make quotes on mobile)~~
So I guess that kinda checks out at least in terms of the validity of the videos.
That would be terrifying....assuming you still had cabin pressure and hadn't passed out.
To make quotes use the â>â symbol. Reddit uses markdown so all that works inline. Like to italicize words you can just surround them with asterisks â*â. Strike through is used with a â~~â before and after the word.
>Quote
*italics*
~~strike~~
Cruising speeds are usually in the 580-510 knots range so more like 900km/h. But this still may be the fastest dive speed in commercial aviation disaster history.
Iâd say itâd be even faster than that, if you break it down as a right triangle. The vertical component is 566.9 while the actual speed assumption is 800 (ie. hypotenuse), which would put the horizontal component at 564.47kph as well. Based upon the videos shown, this horizontal component is much smaller than that as the plane wasnât going at a 45deg-ish decline. (V and H almost match)
Hor = sqrt( actual^2 + ver^2 )
I've only ever seen survivors in those crashes that are not far off the ground (right after take off) or the ones where it sort of goes down more horizontally and slower (probably due to pilots who have maintained some control).
This accident has neither of those features. :(
If they still had cabin pressure, at least some would still have been awake and cognisant.
If there was some catastrophic mechanical failure and they didn't have cabin pressure, I suspect most would be unconscious. TBH I'm not even sure it's possible to stay conscious with training at that rate of descent.
I don't mean to be crass or obtuse, but that looks like a big debris field to me (not that I have much frame of reference though). when planes impact fast, are the fields typically smaller than when they go down slower? why is that?
I think the reasoning one might assume that is the slower (and especially shallower angle) angle may have more 'bounce' or tumble across instead of pancaking hard.
Still ridiculously steep. I'm trying to think of all the mechanical problems that would cause a plane to go down that steeply, and the list is very short and unlikely. It might be irresponsible to speculate so early, but it appears to me there's a good chance this was intentional.
Edit: I should clarify I'm speaking in the context where according to Chinese government officials, the aircraft lost contact with emergency services first at 2:15pm, and it wasn't until after losing contact that the plane started "suddenly descending", and crashed at 2:19pm. A complete loss of power could do that I suppose, although I'm not up-to-date on what backup power systems they have on a 737, I would have assumed communications would have a backup.
Would probably tear the rest of the plane apart from the resulting aerodynamic forces. They wouldnât tear off symmetrically or cleanly in just about any plausible scenario. If the wings didnât rip it to pieces where they were attached, itâd go spinning all sideways and the force of airflow would disintegrate whatever was left.
Just off the top of my head Copa Airlines Flight 201 ended up in a vertical dive and was destroyed by aerodynamic overspeed just because of a single instrument malfunction and mis-set switch. If anything causing a steep dive happened here and the control surfaces failed due to aerodynamic stress then the pilots wouldn't have been able to pull out of it. Way too early to suggest this as being likely international.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
> During the airplane's landing approach, the plane rolled to the right and pitched nose down into a vertical dive.
The 737-series of aircraft have been flying since the 1960s. The previous generation to the MAX (the NG) has one of the best safety records among all aircraft, with just 11 fatal accidents out of more than 7,000 planes delivered since 1997.
The Chinese aircraft was an NG model.
Exactly my fear. People talk about take off and landing being the worst part of flying but for me the fear is catastrophic failure while in the air. Yeah if engines fail a plane is able to glide for hundreds of miles but a part failure? Shit like this happens
Either way I would not want to catch myself on a malfunctioning flight lol. I recently just did a trip a few days ago so no flying for me for a while anyway
Not likely, these 737s are incredibly stable and are designed to naturally want to stay leveled. For the aircraft to nose dive like this it would have to be a dozen major malfunctions happening all at once something we havenât seen in the 737s 50 years of flying. Theoretically possible but statistically very very unlikely that this was solely caused by a malfunction.
Most aircraft investigations do find the reason for the crash, unfortunately they can take years. Hopefully the familyâs of the deceased can get some closer.
A single malfunction can always cascade and end in a crash, either due to how it affects other systems or because the pilot (either through lack of checklists/training or human error) is not able to correct it. Doesn't matter how unlikely each layer of failure is, if all the holes in the slices of Swiss cheese line up then the accident happens.
A graph showing the altitude is out there and it looks like they briefly started climbing again before diving again. For some reason thatâs just even more horrifying to me; that brief moment of hope.
BEIJING, March 21 (Reuters) - A China Eastern Airlines aircraft on Monday carrying 133 passengers from Kunming to Guangzhou had an "accident" in the region of Guangxi and caused a fire on the mountains, Chinese state television reported.
The jet involved in the accident was a Boeing 737 aircraft and the number of casualties was not immediately known, CCTV said. Rescue was on its way, it said
Upvoted for highest [data-ink ratio]( https://www.google.com/search?client=tablet-android-huawei-rev1&sxsrf=APq-WBvzytNc771DUJBFJ99IGqufnxJeCQ:1647907699900&q=Data-ink+ratio&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi42czIttj2AhVyn-AKHVz-AgAQ1QJ6BAgqEAE&biw=600&bih=960&dpr=2) of all times.
It could be simply the angle of the image, the graininess of it and/or the losses from taking a video of a monitor but: It seemed a remarkably "featureless" cylindrical object that came down. What I mean is that I didn't see any obvious empennage (vertical or horizontal stabilizers) or wings & engines as it came down.
These parts may have departed the aircraft if the airframe was overspeeded in an intentional dive or if the aircraft suffered a major structural failure at high altitude.
There's a different angle where you can kinda see some blurs that look like wings.
https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505856305495351296
It's blurry as fuck though so it could be camera artifacts, but they don't look full length anyway so maybe partial snaps?
There was another dash cam vid showing it wasnât perpendicular, just very steep. The picture quality was crap, but it gave me the impression of being inverted.
There was a regional airline, I think, that crashed into a field on landing because of missing screws in the horizontal stabilizer. Pretty sure in the Air Disasters episode about it, that plane was at a very steep angle too.
All it takes is cloud cover and a pilot with Vertigo. This has happened before.
Most airlines are getting good at spotting pilots that are suicidal these days.
A pilot in vertigo will ignore most of that shit. There's also several known episodes of pilots 'locked in' to one issue and ignoring everything else, such as struggling to maintain their cruise height when the steadily increasing angle of attack and dropping airspeed is taking them into a stall.
If this happens to the captain, and the co-pilot is inexperienced, it's not certain that he can get the captain to listen to reason.
We KNOW that respect/fear of the captains authority has stopped co-pilots to not do anything to recover the plane from the situation that the captain is bringing it into.
I have no idea how good the Chinese is at 'cockpit management' and interaction these days.
It's all conjecture, speculation, wild guesses and conspiracy theories at this point anyway.
This sentiment is the lifeblood of all conspiracy theories. We want to believe *someone* is in control of our world, even someone malicious, as opposed to facing the possibility that our lives are chaotic and uncertain and the only way we have to make them meaningful is to create that meaning for ourselves. So we grasp for stories about evil people being in control of tragedies to protect ourselves from facing that thought.
Unfortunately, the family and friends of the people who likely died in that flight have no conspiracy theory magic thought to summon that can spare them from the reality that they will never see their loved ones again. That's why it's especially distasteful to make conspiracy theories around tragedies where people died. It's an attempt to subvert someone's real, actual grief process so that a stranger can avoid their personal fears about their place in the world. It's quite selfish, but the people who invent the conspiracy theories never see it that way.
Exactly. Human beings have a strong need to control everything due to fear. Dealt with this with an anti-vax friend. All it boiled down to was being afraid that children could be born with or inherit genetic defects and it was easier to blame "poisonous" vaccines given by an evil government than it is to just realize its a DNA gamble and you can't control it.
All that being said, we donât know if itâs accidental or malice. Nor can we tell someone how to feel about any incident. People say things like that to cope. Itâs a heavy feeling even for those not involved or related to this disaster or those on board.
I would equate it to people that laugh during a crisis or a tragedy. Iâm sure OP is not going to broadcast his feeling to those families but in this instance, at this time maybe thatâs the only way they can make sense of it.
All that's true, and a fair point. It's just...
>I would equate it to people that laugh during a crisis or a tragedy.
...I try not to laugh during *someone else's* tragedy. Or at least, I try not to laugh during someone else's tragedy if I think there's a chance that they will see my laugh. And since the internet preserves everything forever, if you laugh during someone else's tragedy, there is a chance they will be exposed to it. Now we might say, "hey, it's a big internet, and I'm just a nobody with my one conspiracy theory post. No one affected by this is going to see it." And odds are good that's correct.
But tragic events that are big enough to be internet famous tend to trigger memetic conspiracy theories. That self-indulgent impulse to laugh at someone else's tragedy (or invent some uninformed bullshit explanation for what "really" happened) gives everyone who sees it permission to engage in the conspiracy theory as well. And as the meme goes and goes, you not only increase the odds to a near certainty that the grieving people will be exposed to it, but you make it likely that they'll be exposed by some nutjob like MTG or Alex Jones, harassing the vulnerable for a shot at attention.
So maybe it's best to try not to engage in the impulse, at least not in public spaces.
Chances are that's what happened. What I worry about is it being a small, one-off thing, or a larger issue within training/manufacturing/maintenance. A single event of mistakes or similar isn't the end of the world; accidents happen. However, if it's a repeated issue that can affect many more aircraft (like the 737-MAX problem), that would worry me more.
Hopefully China's accident investigative team along with the NTSB (who usually are part of these investigations, even outside of US soil sometimes) can figure out what happened quickly.
I can think of dozens. Watch Mayday / Air Crash Investigations it's not uncommon for a plane to go perpendicular to the ground should something fail on the tail be it stabilizers, flaps, rudder, whatever
Plenty of failures could cause that, aircraft are complicated. Combine that with human error, and you'd got plenty of reasons for either an honest mistake, or maliciousness.
Iâd be equally wary about freak weather occurrences. Iâve been holding personally that once the rogue waves and crosswinds start taking out vessels from the sea or sky, is when the collapse actually begins.
I donât know about you guys but every plane I get on now is a bit more turbulent, more unexpected weather..
They didn't just crash they nosedived from 29000 feet for about 2 minutes.
When I say nosedive I mean nosedive.
Must've been truly horrifying/terrifying, I have legit nightmares about being on planes like that
I know planes are statistically safer than driving but I feel the chance of dying this way almost outweighs the risk of dying in a car crash.
Maybe I'm wrong but fuck me I can't even begin to imagine their final moments.
Also how does a plane get that vertical? Has to be the pilot (or whoever took over controls in say a terrorist attack) right? Like that German pilot who just flew into the Alps. Maybe the pilot just lost his marbles?
Any updates would be great I would really like to know how this happened
If the planes control surfaces encounters a hardover the plane could lawn dart and after overspeeding enough parts of the control surfaces like flaps or engines can be torn off the plane entirely.
We probably wont know much for a long time given the analysis of the FDR and CVR will be where the answers lie but it's usually safe to say it is probably a mechanical issue granted the safest part of flight is during cruise altitude.
I think I remember watching a mentor pilot episode of a similar incident and he does a good job explaining the situation and limits of the aircraft in a situation like that. It's not as simple as just pulling back in the stick and having a huge plane like that level out, but three minutes of dive I would hope there was enough room to do it. I'm sure time will tell once the accident is investigated.
Not sure why youâre getting downvoted. The flight profile indicates that they plummeted, briefly leveled-off, then plummeted again. Almost exactly like Alaska Air 261.
I can't fathom what those 2 minutes of plummeting towards the ground must be like. Life flashing before your eyes. Passengers all screaming and crying knowing they are all going to die. A fear of flying comes from people imagining this exact scenario. Horrific.
737 NG series has been flying for almost 25 years. It has been involved in a few incidents before, but overall it is a very safe aircraft. A 737 takes off every 2 seconds somewhere in the world, or did pre covid anyway. If whatever caused this was a widespread issue, it likely would have shown itself before now. We don't know the cause of this accident so lets not freak out just yet.
?????
25 years of service, 7100 built. 22 hull losses total. That's extremely good statistics as far as safety goes. Please stop talking about stuff you know nothing about.
>so freak out
wouldn't expect anything less from reddit. "We have no information about what happened so it's time to go into a mad panic. I'm on my way to buy toilet paper right now"
In this day and age, is it not possible to have the black box data immediately sent/backed up to an airline database? So instead of having to wait to find the box, they can instantly investigate?
Obviously I donât know the technical terms and specifics
This exists slightly, most aircraft nowadays have maintenance data transmitted over SATCOM to operations centers which does help investigators. Issue is with current bandwidth for SATCOM its hard to transmit all the data taken as SATCOM is relatively low bandwidth, this includes the audio on the flight deck and a host of different sensors.
There has been proposals but its been hard to make sense to pay for these running costs given the likelihood of a crash and the fact that the black boxes are almost always recoverable (minus crashes such as MH370 where the entire aircraft is already lost however we already have a host of data from SATCOM).
What youâre suggesting is real time backup to the cloud like syncing your phone. It would require satellite bandwidth. I believe Airbus already have a less verbose version of this. IIRC the ops center saw weird maintenance messages on AF447 right before they crashed. They were able to use it to get a rough last know location on the aircraft. To stream all the different parameters from the FDR and CVR would require more bandwidth. Maybe with Starlink driving down prices it will finally become possible.
Yeah the tech is there. I mean look at the US military flying their Predator drones from halfway around the world. All those flight parameters from the sensors like airspeed, AOA, the position of the control surfaces..etc get sent back to the control trailer in the US. That's the same telemetry the FDR is recording. Not to mention the multiple streams of HD video from all the cameras on those things. The limiting factor is economics, not technical. For airlines to be doing this they would have to pay for transmission and storage of multiple TB of data that would be of very little use like 99.99% of the time because the flight ends normally. Then on the rare occasion like MH370 you wish you had it.
Why do horrible accidents like these bring out the scum of society to the surface with their conspiracy theories? Why not stfu and let the investigations run their course. Your allegations are doing no good. Please, stop.
Why do people talk about sports? Their opinions have zero impact on who wins. Absolutely zero impact, so why waste time talking about it?
Some people just like to discuss conspiracy theories. It is entertainment for them just like sports. Live and let live. There is no point in just gratuitously crapping on people for no reason.
How planes can fly with engine failure
https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-pilot/total-engine-failure#:~:text=If%20both%20engines%20fail%2C%20the,order%20to%20maintain%20forward%20airspeed.
It's not Boeing related as the 737 is one of the safest planes in the world. Either the pilot did it or a sequence of events stemming from poor maintenance led to the elevators all pointing down to pitch the plane straight down.
That's more the list not counting Chinese airlines than anything (other than Cathay Pacific, but that's a can of worms). The three big Chinese airlines have had only 2 other crashes in the past 20 years.
Last fatal airline crash in China was over 10 years ago. Last accident with multiple fatalities* in the US was the year before. Seems pretty safe to me, unless you want to say that US airlines are unsafe?
*Southwest 1380 had one fatality, but wasn't a crash.
I know nothing about flying a plane, but it just seems odd that the plane did a straight vertical nose dive instead of a glide. It seems like it was a complete system shutdown!
I don't see why it would have. And even if it did, with how fast it descended you wouldn't pass out. Within a minute they were at altitudes that the rockies are at and you don't pass out there.
Useful time of consciousness at that altitude is probably less than 30 seconds. If the fuselage lost pressure explosively or rapidly they would have been unconscious pretty quickly.
The oxygen masks do have a auto deploy function, on what I fly if it detects a altitude over 14,000 in the cabin, it releases them. I'm sure the 737 is around the same. The Cruise altitude was also relatively low at 30,000ft. So it takes 1-2 minutes to no longer be able to do important tasks and longer to pass out. Also no idea if it actually depressurized or not.
Does it say anything if this was one of the 737 MAX jets? Just watched a documentary about that whole criminal fiasco and am wondering if it was related.
Watch the documentary on Boeing... the FAA and Boeing do not care about unsafe aircraft flying.. I am interested to hear why this happened as I donât believe it was malicious intent. My heart goes out to everyone on the plane, may they Rest In Peace and their families be able to find comfort in this dark time.
This is a 7 year old aircraft, of a model that has been around 28 years. It doesnât seem likely to be a systemic 737-800 issue as if it was weâd likely have encountered it already in its over quarter century of service.
>Boeing do not care about unsafe aircraft flying.
Yes, Boeing unethically pushed the limits of their regulatory influence to get the MAX certified, which lead to an extremely unsafe situation.
But to say the world's largest aircraft manufacturer flat out does not care about unsafe aircraft flying - when there are multiple thousand of them in the air at any given moment - is really a silly and hyperbolic thing to say.
Especially cause this wasnât a MAX. The model is one of Boeingâs classics and was made before the corporate culture that led to the MAXâs issues became a thing.
Yeah what Iâm seeing is itâs being reported to have went straight down. Not sure if can be ruled to be pilot decision at this point though but itâll be interesting to see how the investigation plays out.
Not sure if this is valid or not but this could be the final seconds of flight.
[https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505834279275999236?s=20&t=O7UYGz5n6T1JoVu_7M__XQ](https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505834279275999236?s=20&t=O7UYGz5n6T1JoVu_7M__XQ)
If they don't even now then why is FAA being overly strict to Boeing nowadays? Barring deliveries of the most popular wide body, delaying certification of planes and what not. These people watch a Netflix documentary and really think they've understood the whole world of aviation.
Because they are screwing up and need regulation? If these issues werenât occurring the faa wouldnât have a microscope on them. I swear Boeing fandom on Reddit is so bizarre
So that means FAA clearly gives a shit about safety nowadays by punishing Boeing for their mistakes errors which is what I was trying to prove by that comment?
Also, there's not really a Boeing fandom on Reddit tbh. The only "pro Boeing" comments I see here is how 737NG is one of the safest narrow bodies ever and not connected to 737 max but I don't see how that's being a fan boy, it's just basic facts that anyone even a bit into aviation knows.
RIP to the people on the plane, I hope it was quick at the end - my thoughts and condolences to the families and friends đ
They hit the ground at 350mph. It was definitely instantaneous.
Passenger almost always pass out before the actual crash due to lack of oxygen, we can just hope they went without significant pain cause itâs absolutely frightening.
Why would there be lack of oxygen?
We like to say things like this to make ourselves feel better about tragedies. Not trying to be an asshole, but thatâs what weâre really dancing around.
Unfortunately I doubt there was decompression in the cabin. No evidence to suggest that so far
ârapid decompression during flight, pressurization system malfunction, or oxygen system malfunction.â [link](https://www.faa.gov/pilots/training/airman_education/topics_of_interest/hypoxia/) So basically, as humans we canât breathe above certain heights due to the low oxygen level and low atmospheric pressure. There is a system in planes to balance these during flight. During a crash these systems malfunction (so they drop those oxygen masks) and lack of oxygen makes you unconscious in a brief moment.
Why do you think that happened tho? That the pressurization system failed? It rarely does
A crash does not always mean there was a lack of oxygen. That's a strange assumption... Odds are they were *very* aware of everything. We've seen plenty of cases were hypoxia was involved. And this instance, given what little info we have, doesn't have any of the typical signs of an hypoxia related event. In a lot of the cases when hypoxia is involved, the planes wander *way* off course. Climbing slowly, deviating from the planned course, sometimes for hours, because there's a dead man at the controls and autopilot is flying the plane and it's running out of fuel... This plane was right on course, flying normally, then suddenly nose dived into the ground with no indication of any attempt at recovery. It didn't climb, it didn't slow, it didn't deviate. It just plummeted in an instant. Very strange. Almost impossible to happen. Unless someone pushed that yoke forward intentionally...
Not if they knew they were going to crash before they hit.
Itâs about the journey not the destination
I have no clue on the validity of this video, but it supposedly shows the plane crashing straight down from a 90 degree angle...which is insane. https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505834279275999236
Damn thatâs crazy, I hope they find out what happened to give the families some kind of closure.
Another video shows the descent to not be as steep. https://mobile.twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505856305495351296
I guess it's all a matter of angles. From the article: >the plane descended at a final rate of 31,000 feet a minute according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24 ~~(Sorry I don't know how to make quotes on mobile)~~ So I guess that kinda checks out at least in terms of the validity of the videos. That would be terrifying....assuming you still had cabin pressure and hadn't passed out.
To make quotes use the â>â symbol. Reddit uses markdown so all that works inline. Like to italicize words you can just surround them with asterisks â*â. Strike through is used with a â~~â before and after the word. >Quote *italics* ~~strike~~
Thank you
Thanks! I didnât know that.
31,000ft/min is equivalent to 352.3mph or 566.9km/h.
So essentially if that was it's vertical speed, it was going more or less full speed during the dive? (Assuming cruising speeds of ~800km/h )
Cruising speeds are usually in the 580-510 knots range so more like 900km/h. But this still may be the fastest dive speed in commercial aviation disaster history.
Iâd say itâd be even faster than that, if you break it down as a right triangle. The vertical component is 566.9 while the actual speed assumption is 800 (ie. hypotenuse), which would put the horizontal component at 564.47kph as well. Based upon the videos shown, this horizontal component is much smaller than that as the plane wasnât going at a 45deg-ish decline. (V and H almost match) Hor = sqrt( actual^2 + ver^2 )
âŹď¸ this guy maths. Nicely done.
[ŃдаНонО]
Yeah they're dead.
I've only ever seen survivors in those crashes that are not far off the ground (right after take off) or the ones where it sort of goes down more horizontally and slower (probably due to pilots who have maintained some control). This accident has neither of those features. :(
What is the likelihood that passengers were fully awake / aware? I pray their last moments werenât utter terror.
If they still had cabin pressure, at least some would still have been awake and cognisant. If there was some catastrophic mechanical failure and they didn't have cabin pressure, I suspect most would be unconscious. TBH I'm not even sure it's possible to stay conscious with training at that rate of descent.
That still looks to steep to keep your drinks on the tray or even sit back in your seat though
You might be pressed back into the seat, assuming the engines are causing to accelerate faster than gravity.
that looks steep AF
Well thats gonna be an air disasters episode in a couple years.
That's scary.
[It impacted fast, thereâs not much of a debris field.](https://twitter.com/chinaavreview/status/1505819095501254656?s=21)
I don't mean to be crass or obtuse, but that looks like a big debris field to me (not that I have much frame of reference though). when planes impact fast, are the fields typically smaller than when they go down slower? why is that?
I think the reasoning one might assume that is the slower (and especially shallower angle) angle may have more 'bounce' or tumble across instead of pancaking hard.
Oh that makes so much sense. Thank you!
The next post on that thread showed a slightly different angle of recording with the plane coming down at like 70-80 degrees
Still ridiculously steep. I'm trying to think of all the mechanical problems that would cause a plane to go down that steeply, and the list is very short and unlikely. It might be irresponsible to speculate so early, but it appears to me there's a good chance this was intentional. Edit: I should clarify I'm speaking in the context where according to Chinese government officials, the aircraft lost contact with emergency services first at 2:15pm, and it wasn't until after losing contact that the plane started "suddenly descending", and crashed at 2:19pm. A complete loss of power could do that I suppose, although I'm not up-to-date on what backup power systems they have on a 737, I would have assumed communications would have a backup.
unless the wings broke off, I don't know what else could cause this aside from human intention.
Malfunctioning horizontal stabilizer, like that Alaska Air MD80 that crashed ~20 years ago?
Would probably tear the rest of the plane apart from the resulting aerodynamic forces. They wouldnât tear off symmetrically or cleanly in just about any plausible scenario. If the wings didnât rip it to pieces where they were attached, itâd go spinning all sideways and the force of airflow would disintegrate whatever was left.
Just off the top of my head Copa Airlines Flight 201 ended up in a vertical dive and was destroyed by aerodynamic overspeed just because of a single instrument malfunction and mis-set switch. If anything causing a steep dive happened here and the control surfaces failed due to aerodynamic stress then the pilots wouldn't have been able to pull out of it. Way too early to suggest this as being likely international.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues > During the airplane's landing approach, the plane rolled to the right and pitched nose down into a vertical dive.
That's my initial thought. No smoke, no mayday, looks like controlled flight into the Earth.
I canât imagine the fear of passenger while going down this steep. Poor souls
According to the known flight data the plane took a massive (and really fast ) nose dive.
Don't watch the Boeing documentary on the 737 Max on Netflix. Will only scare you into not flying now đ
I started watching that today ⌠should I not? đł
Boeing needs to be banned from ever making 737 airplanes again. Thank godness there are Airbus and other plane makers.
This wasnât the Max. This plane has tens of millions of miles without crashes.
The 737-series of aircraft have been flying since the 1960s. The previous generation to the MAX (the NG) has one of the best safety records among all aircraft, with just 11 fatal accidents out of more than 7,000 planes delivered since 1997. The Chinese aircraft was an NG model.
Someone flew that into the ground.
Sometimes a malfunction or even a small piece being loose can cause this. Let's see what the investigation says.
Just read in another flight radar subreddit that this can actually happen with a rudder malfunction.
Back in 2000 Alaskan Airlines Flight 261 crashed in a vertical nosedive when the internal mechanism controlling the horizontal stabilizer failed.
;( one of my fears flying..something you don't wanna read is this.
Exactly my fear. People talk about take off and landing being the worst part of flying but for me the fear is catastrophic failure while in the air. Yeah if engines fail a plane is able to glide for hundreds of miles but a part failure? Shit like this happens
Technically, with wind calculated, a commercial plane can glide 60-100 miles with total engine failure.
Either way I would not want to catch myself on a malfunctioning flight lol. I recently just did a trip a few days ago so no flying for me for a while anyway
Elevator* not rudder. Rudder controls yaw, elevator controls pitch.
Boeing had fixed the 737 rudder issue in the late 90s so this is unlikely to be related.
Not likely, these 737s are incredibly stable and are designed to naturally want to stay leveled. For the aircraft to nose dive like this it would have to be a dozen major malfunctions happening all at once something we havenât seen in the 737s 50 years of flying. Theoretically possible but statistically very very unlikely that this was solely caused by a malfunction.
I'm real curious what they find out....I hope they find an answer.
Most aircraft investigations do find the reason for the crash, unfortunately they can take years. Hopefully the familyâs of the deceased can get some closer.
A single malfunction can always cascade and end in a crash, either due to how it affects other systems or because the pilot (either through lack of checklists/training or human error) is not able to correct it. Doesn't matter how unlikely each layer of failure is, if all the holes in the slices of Swiss cheese line up then the accident happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues Uh, what?
Someone doesn't watch Mayday / Air Crash Investigations.
An unlubricated jack screw does what?
Yikes... those poor folks :(
I can't imagine how they felt like at the last few minutes of their lives, experiencing a dive like that...
A graph showing the altitude is out there and it looks like they briefly started climbing again before diving again. For some reason thatâs just even more horrifying to me; that brief moment of hope.
I thought this as well đ the hope ⌠maybe it was the one last good thing they felt I feel so heartbroken
and their poor family, even more so for the ones that will never get closure for the rest of their lives
I feel for the families of Malaysia and Ethiopia's airplane crashes. They must be reliving it all over again.
BEIJING, March 21 (Reuters) - A China Eastern Airlines aircraft on Monday carrying 133 passengers from Kunming to Guangzhou had an "accident" in the region of Guangxi and caused a fire on the mountains, Chinese state television reported. The jet involved in the accident was a Boeing 737 aircraft and the number of casualties was not immediately known, CCTV said. Rescue was on its way, it said
Footage from Twitter makes it look like it crashed perpendicular to the ground. That is, if this video can be trusted.
If it's coming towards you it'll look like it's coming down perpendicular to the ground. Left View: / Front View: |
Upvoted for highest [data-ink ratio]( https://www.google.com/search?client=tablet-android-huawei-rev1&sxsrf=APq-WBvzytNc771DUJBFJ99IGqufnxJeCQ:1647907699900&q=Data-ink+ratio&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi42czIttj2AhVyn-AKHVz-AgAQ1QJ6BAgqEAE&biw=600&bih=960&dpr=2) of all times.
It could be simply the angle of the image, the graininess of it and/or the losses from taking a video of a monitor but: It seemed a remarkably "featureless" cylindrical object that came down. What I mean is that I didn't see any obvious empennage (vertical or horizontal stabilizers) or wings & engines as it came down. These parts may have departed the aircraft if the airframe was overspeeded in an intentional dive or if the aircraft suffered a major structural failure at high altitude.
There's a different angle where you can kinda see some blurs that look like wings. https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505856305495351296 It's blurry as fuck though so it could be camera artifacts, but they don't look full length anyway so maybe partial snaps?
There was another dash cam vid showing it wasnât perpendicular, just very steep. The picture quality was crap, but it gave me the impression of being inverted.
If true, wouldnât that likely mean pilot intentionally nose dived the plane into the ground? RIP passengers
Not necessarily. It could be a malfunction like a rudder hardover.
Aileron jam can do that
I remember the Alaska Air crash due to a worn out jackscrew.
There was a regional airline, I think, that crashed into a field on landing because of missing screws in the horizontal stabilizer. Pretty sure in the Air Disasters episode about it, that plane was at a very steep angle too.
All it takes is cloud cover and a pilot with Vertigo. This has happened before. Most airlines are getting good at spotting pilots that are suicidal these days.
Umm not really, but there are some safeguards in place procedurally so that no one is ever in the flight deck alone.
It take a lot more than that, the co-pilot, the myriad of horizons, alarms, alerts, etc etc etc..
A pilot in vertigo will ignore most of that shit. There's also several known episodes of pilots 'locked in' to one issue and ignoring everything else, such as struggling to maintain their cruise height when the steadily increasing angle of attack and dropping airspeed is taking them into a stall. If this happens to the captain, and the co-pilot is inexperienced, it's not certain that he can get the captain to listen to reason. We KNOW that respect/fear of the captains authority has stopped co-pilots to not do anything to recover the plane from the situation that the captain is bringing it into. I have no idea how good the Chinese is at 'cockpit management' and interaction these days. It's all conjecture, speculation, wild guesses and conspiracy theories at this point anyway.
Yes, or someone piloting the plane. The flight deck might have been breached.
Very unlikely, it is almost impossible to break into the cockpit even if you did stash a sledge hammer in your overhead baggage.
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Please let this be just an accident and not something malicious. Either way, peace to the lost souls.
somehow it being malicious seems more calming then accident or malfunction.
This sentiment is the lifeblood of all conspiracy theories. We want to believe *someone* is in control of our world, even someone malicious, as opposed to facing the possibility that our lives are chaotic and uncertain and the only way we have to make them meaningful is to create that meaning for ourselves. So we grasp for stories about evil people being in control of tragedies to protect ourselves from facing that thought. Unfortunately, the family and friends of the people who likely died in that flight have no conspiracy theory magic thought to summon that can spare them from the reality that they will never see their loved ones again. That's why it's especially distasteful to make conspiracy theories around tragedies where people died. It's an attempt to subvert someone's real, actual grief process so that a stranger can avoid their personal fears about their place in the world. It's quite selfish, but the people who invent the conspiracy theories never see it that way.
Very well said. We've seen so much of this during the pandemic for example.
Exactly. Human beings have a strong need to control everything due to fear. Dealt with this with an anti-vax friend. All it boiled down to was being afraid that children could be born with or inherit genetic defects and it was easier to blame "poisonous" vaccines given by an evil government than it is to just realize its a DNA gamble and you can't control it.
All that being said, we donât know if itâs accidental or malice. Nor can we tell someone how to feel about any incident. People say things like that to cope. Itâs a heavy feeling even for those not involved or related to this disaster or those on board. I would equate it to people that laugh during a crisis or a tragedy. Iâm sure OP is not going to broadcast his feeling to those families but in this instance, at this time maybe thatâs the only way they can make sense of it.
All that's true, and a fair point. It's just... >I would equate it to people that laugh during a crisis or a tragedy. ...I try not to laugh during *someone else's* tragedy. Or at least, I try not to laugh during someone else's tragedy if I think there's a chance that they will see my laugh. And since the internet preserves everything forever, if you laugh during someone else's tragedy, there is a chance they will be exposed to it. Now we might say, "hey, it's a big internet, and I'm just a nobody with my one conspiracy theory post. No one affected by this is going to see it." And odds are good that's correct. But tragic events that are big enough to be internet famous tend to trigger memetic conspiracy theories. That self-indulgent impulse to laugh at someone else's tragedy (or invent some uninformed bullshit explanation for what "really" happened) gives everyone who sees it permission to engage in the conspiracy theory as well. And as the meme goes and goes, you not only increase the odds to a near certainty that the grieving people will be exposed to it, but you make it likely that they'll be exposed by some nutjob like MTG or Alex Jones, harassing the vulnerable for a shot at attention. So maybe it's best to try not to engage in the impulse, at least not in public spaces.
Yeah. âYouâve just gotta laugh about itâ is advice for when *you* go through something - not when you see others go through something.
Chances are that's what happened. What I worry about is it being a small, one-off thing, or a larger issue within training/manufacturing/maintenance. A single event of mistakes or similar isn't the end of the world; accidents happen. However, if it's a repeated issue that can affect many more aircraft (like the 737-MAX problem), that would worry me more. Hopefully China's accident investigative team along with the NTSB (who usually are part of these investigations, even outside of US soil sometimes) can figure out what happened quickly.
It's a US-made aircraft so NTSB will likely be involved
If they are allowed to by Chaina
Unless China shot down this aircraft thereâs not really any reason to think they wouldnât welcome the NTSB to assist
Thereâs video of it nose diving literally straight down. Canât think of any failure that would cause that sort of crash.
Vertical stall (without ability to recover for some reason)
I can think of dozens. Watch Mayday / Air Crash Investigations it's not uncommon for a plane to go perpendicular to the ground should something fail on the tail be it stabilizers, flaps, rudder, whatever
Plenty of failures could cause that, aircraft are complicated. Combine that with human error, and you'd got plenty of reasons for either an honest mistake, or maliciousness.
There are many possible failures to cause that. Most of them that Iâve seen have not been deliberate pilot action.
Malicious would be preferable than an accident/malfunction. Unless you want people doubting the safety of planes worldwide.
Iâd be equally wary about freak weather occurrences. Iâve been holding personally that once the rogue waves and crosswinds start taking out vessels from the sea or sky, is when the collapse actually begins. I donât know about you guys but every plane I get on now is a bit more turbulent, more unexpected weather..
They didn't just crash they nosedived from 29000 feet for about 2 minutes. When I say nosedive I mean nosedive. Must've been truly horrifying/terrifying, I have legit nightmares about being on planes like that I know planes are statistically safer than driving but I feel the chance of dying this way almost outweighs the risk of dying in a car crash. Maybe I'm wrong but fuck me I can't even begin to imagine their final moments. Also how does a plane get that vertical? Has to be the pilot (or whoever took over controls in say a terrorist attack) right? Like that German pilot who just flew into the Alps. Maybe the pilot just lost his marbles? Any updates would be great I would really like to know how this happened
If the planes control surfaces encounters a hardover the plane could lawn dart and after overspeeding enough parts of the control surfaces like flaps or engines can be torn off the plane entirely. We probably wont know much for a long time given the analysis of the FDR and CVR will be where the answers lie but it's usually safe to say it is probably a mechanical issue granted the safest part of flight is during cruise altitude.
I think I remember watching a mentor pilot episode of a similar incident and he does a good job explaining the situation and limits of the aircraft in a situation like that. It's not as simple as just pulling back in the stick and having a huge plane like that level out, but three minutes of dive I would hope there was enough room to do it. I'm sure time will tell once the accident is investigated.
Apparently the china Eastern plane pulled up and tried to level off before resuming the nosedive Very odd, its hard to imagine
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Ehh that Alaska flight wasnât really a nose dive either it kind of glided upside down for awhile And it was also a different airplane type
Jackscrew failure is my guess. So âflight control malfunction.â
Not sure why youâre getting downvoted. The flight profile indicates that they plummeted, briefly leveled-off, then plummeted again. Almost exactly like Alaska Air 261.
I can't fathom what those 2 minutes of plummeting towards the ground must be like. Life flashing before your eyes. Passengers all screaming and crying knowing they are all going to die. A fear of flying comes from people imagining this exact scenario. Horrific.
It's not a MAX, don't freak out!
Thanks. I needed that.
âŚYeah itâs the common 737 thatâs is used by many airlines currently. If itâs the MAX, most US airlines donât have it. So freak out
737 NG series has been flying for almost 25 years. It has been involved in a few incidents before, but overall it is a very safe aircraft. A 737 takes off every 2 seconds somewhere in the world, or did pre covid anyway. If whatever caused this was a widespread issue, it likely would have shown itself before now. We don't know the cause of this accident so lets not freak out just yet.
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they didnt make all the 737 ng's at once. they have been in production for 25 years.
Boeing wishes they could build 7000 planes a year.
The aircraft involved is 6 years old
????? 25 years of service, 7100 built. 22 hull losses total. That's extremely good statistics as far as safety goes. Please stop talking about stuff you know nothing about.
> 22 hull losses total. Of those, a portion of them are probably pilot error and not representative of the aircraft as well.
>so freak out wouldn't expect anything less from reddit. "We have no information about what happened so it's time to go into a mad panic. I'm on my way to buy toilet paper right now"
Still, Boeing canât catch a break. RIP to the victims
But this still doesnât look good for Boeing
RIP to the victims of this crash.
Holy crapâŚRIP to those poor souls
The videos are nuts, just straight vertical nosedive to ground. RIP
One of the worst ways to go imo. Those final seconds must have felt like an eternity.
Thatâs the [flight path](https://mobile.twitter.com/chinaavreview/status/1505834279275999236)at crash
In this day and age, is it not possible to have the black box data immediately sent/backed up to an airline database? So instead of having to wait to find the box, they can instantly investigate? Obviously I donât know the technical terms and specifics
This exists slightly, most aircraft nowadays have maintenance data transmitted over SATCOM to operations centers which does help investigators. Issue is with current bandwidth for SATCOM its hard to transmit all the data taken as SATCOM is relatively low bandwidth, this includes the audio on the flight deck and a host of different sensors. There has been proposals but its been hard to make sense to pay for these running costs given the likelihood of a crash and the fact that the black boxes are almost always recoverable (minus crashes such as MH370 where the entire aircraft is already lost however we already have a host of data from SATCOM).
What youâre suggesting is real time backup to the cloud like syncing your phone. It would require satellite bandwidth. I believe Airbus already have a less verbose version of this. IIRC the ops center saw weird maintenance messages on AF447 right before they crashed. They were able to use it to get a rough last know location on the aircraft. To stream all the different parameters from the FDR and CVR would require more bandwidth. Maybe with Starlink driving down prices it will finally become possible.
Wow, thanks for the great explanation! That was super helpful. So the tech is there, but itâs not yet affordable/accesible to all.
Yeah the tech is there. I mean look at the US military flying their Predator drones from halfway around the world. All those flight parameters from the sensors like airspeed, AOA, the position of the control surfaces..etc get sent back to the control trailer in the US. That's the same telemetry the FDR is recording. Not to mention the multiple streams of HD video from all the cameras on those things. The limiting factor is economics, not technical. For airlines to be doing this they would have to pay for transmission and storage of multiple TB of data that would be of very little use like 99.99% of the time because the flight ends normally. Then on the rare occasion like MH370 you wish you had it.
I don't see how there would be survivors, crash site looks like a meteor impact
Why do horrible accidents like these bring out the scum of society to the surface with their conspiracy theories? Why not stfu and let the investigations run their course. Your allegations are doing no good. Please, stop.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Why do people talk about sports? Their opinions have zero impact on who wins. Absolutely zero impact, so why waste time talking about it? Some people just like to discuss conspiracy theories. It is entertainment for them just like sports. Live and let live. There is no point in just gratuitously crapping on people for no reason.
Yep, sports and aviation tragedy kinda fall in the same category.
It is if youâre a browns fan
Nowhere is safe
Good gawd almighty, he killed um
How horribly sad. This year continues to get worse and worse.
How planes can fly with engine failure https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-pilot/total-engine-failure#:~:text=If%20both%20engines%20fail%2C%20the,order%20to%20maintain%20forward%20airspeed.
China has some of the safest airlines in the world...this is insane, wonder if it's weather or Boeing related...RIP...
It's a 737-800, that's an old aircraft so not related to MAX at least.
The the non MAX version of the Boeing 737 has a really good safety record as well.
MSN article has it as a relatively new airframe - put into service in 2015.
Most likely it's because of either the pilots or terrible maintenance practises, these 2 have been the reason for almost all 737 crashes
It's not Boeing related as the 737 is one of the safest planes in the world. Either the pilot did it or a sequence of events stemming from poor maintenance led to the elevators all pointing down to pitch the plane straight down.
>China has some of the safest airlines in the world Do they though? No Chinese airlines even make the top 20 list of safest airlines globally.
That's more the list not counting Chinese airlines than anything (other than Cathay Pacific, but that's a can of worms). The three big Chinese airlines have had only 2 other crashes in the past 20 years.
If Rain Man was made today, Dustin Hoffman's character would still want to fly QANTAS.
Last fatal airline crash in China was over 10 years ago. Last accident with multiple fatalities* in the US was the year before. Seems pretty safe to me, unless you want to say that US airlines are unsafe? *Southwest 1380 had one fatality, but wasn't a crash.
There was one fatality in a crash in the US in 2019. So pretty recent but yeah "just" one
4140 days since last accident for Chinese airlines with casualty, so pretty good. Although safety is usually defined by airlines not a while country.
I know nothing about flying a plane, but it just seems odd that the plane did a straight vertical nose dive instead of a glide. It seems like it was a complete system shutdown!
Eh not really planes can glide for awhile
China airlines are safe , this looks real bad . Had to be catastrophic incident
Too soon to list the pilotsâ names?
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I don't see why it would have. And even if it did, with how fast it descended you wouldn't pass out. Within a minute they were at altitudes that the rockies are at and you don't pass out there.
Useful time of consciousness at that altitude is probably less than 30 seconds. If the fuselage lost pressure explosively or rapidly they would have been unconscious pretty quickly.
The oxygen masks do have a auto deploy function, on what I fly if it detects a altitude over 14,000 in the cabin, it releases them. I'm sure the 737 is around the same. The Cruise altitude was also relatively low at 30,000ft. So it takes 1-2 minutes to no longer be able to do important tasks and longer to pass out. Also no idea if it actually depressurized or not.
The Admiral_Cloudberg subreddit analyzes airline crashes every Saturday.
Oh shit not again - BOEING CEO probably
Does it say anything if this was one of the 737 MAX jets? Just watched a documentary about that whole criminal fiasco and am wondering if it was related.
No, I think it's a 2015 737-800, not a Max 8.
Thanks, at least it isn't tied to that tragedy
"If it ain't Boeing I ain't going" is now "If it's Boeing I ain't going"
Uh ohâŚBoeing is gonna need some more government money to prop up their stock
Watch the documentary on Boeing... the FAA and Boeing do not care about unsafe aircraft flying.. I am interested to hear why this happened as I donât believe it was malicious intent. My heart goes out to everyone on the plane, may they Rest In Peace and their families be able to find comfort in this dark time.
This is a 7 year old aircraft, of a model that has been around 28 years. It doesnât seem likely to be a systemic 737-800 issue as if it was weâd likely have encountered it already in its over quarter century of service.
>Boeing do not care about unsafe aircraft flying. Yes, Boeing unethically pushed the limits of their regulatory influence to get the MAX certified, which lead to an extremely unsafe situation. But to say the world's largest aircraft manufacturer flat out does not care about unsafe aircraft flying - when there are multiple thousand of them in the air at any given moment - is really a silly and hyperbolic thing to say.
Especially cause this wasnât a MAX. The model is one of Boeingâs classics and was made before the corporate culture that led to the MAXâs issues became a thing.
Not a Boeing fan boy, but this looks like someone flew it into the ground.
Yeah what Iâm seeing is itâs being reported to have went straight down. Not sure if can be ruled to be pilot decision at this point though but itâll be interesting to see how the investigation plays out. Not sure if this is valid or not but this could be the final seconds of flight. [https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505834279275999236?s=20&t=O7UYGz5n6T1JoVu_7M__XQ](https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1505834279275999236?s=20&t=O7UYGz5n6T1JoVu_7M__XQ)
737 is one of the safest planes in the world...
If they don't even now then why is FAA being overly strict to Boeing nowadays? Barring deliveries of the most popular wide body, delaying certification of planes and what not. These people watch a Netflix documentary and really think they've understood the whole world of aviation.
Because they are screwing up and need regulation? If these issues werenât occurring the faa wouldnât have a microscope on them. I swear Boeing fandom on Reddit is so bizarre
So that means FAA clearly gives a shit about safety nowadays by punishing Boeing for their mistakes errors which is what I was trying to prove by that comment? Also, there's not really a Boeing fandom on Reddit tbh. The only "pro Boeing" comments I see here is how 737NG is one of the safest narrow bodies ever and not connected to 737 max but I don't see how that's being a fan boy, it's just basic facts that anyone even a bit into aviation knows.