At this point, your agreement would be purely speculative.

Hey now, as a pilot with most of my hours in a 172 I am highly offended by that remark!  



The thing to keep in mind is cruise is the boring part of the flight.  You trim the plane out or engage auto pilot and basically just monitor systems unless making flight changes as directed by ATC or weather.  To think the co-pilot purposefully pulled the aircraft into that climb is crazy.  Something caused the upset, the only unknown is why it wasn't recoverable.  
 

Have you intentionally spun a 172 ?

Nope.  I am pretty sure I would lose my lunch.
 

Sorry to hear that.
Mandatory training here if you want your license.

You really have to force a 172 into a spin, if you don't get it right the aircraft just rolls on its side and levels out with a slight nose down attitude.
Skyhawks are the most gentle aircraft to recover from abnormal attitudes.

I have kind of slacked off since I got my ticket, one of my goals is to go take acrobatic training.  Wife is not amused.



Having said that, I did get to do some cool things during training.  I have landed on a very short field (>1,500) and done 4 engine out simulations all the way to the ground.  And a full crosswind performance landing.  That one was full of pucker factor.  



 

QZ8501: Indonesia resumes search for crash victims

"JAKARTA: Indonesian rescuers on Sunday (Feb 1) resumed their search for 86 victims still missing from the AirAsia plane that crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board, an official said.

National search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo last week said search and rescue teams were being given two days' break after weeks searching in inhospitable conditions.

Sixty-eight divers from the national search and rescue agency as well as others from companies and clubs would focus on scouring the fuselage of Flight QZ8501 and the seabed for remaining bodies, he said.

So far, 76 bodies have been recovered after the plane went down in the Java Sea in stormy weather during what was supposed to be a short trip from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

"Search operations have resumed. Our focus today is to find bodies that could be trapped in the fuselage, or buried in mud," S B Supriyadi, a search and rescue agency official who has been coordinating the hunt, told AFP. "The weather is good, and the waves were only a metre high," he said, adding that six boats were in the search area.

The search mission has been expanded to the island of Sulawesi after fishermen found bodies with identity documents matching the passengers on the ill-fated flight.

The Indonesian military, which has provided the bulk of personnel and equipment for the operation, withdrew from the search on Tuesday. But Supriyadi said the current group also comprises competent divers."


Discussion:   I had read earlier that there were no more bodies in the fuselage...which I do not believe.

What happened with the object that was thought to be the cockpit?  Did they determine what it was?

It sounds like they may do what I would do....start making dives along the crash area and let the current carry you.  Start a bit upcurrent of the debris field.    Spread out laterally as required and just keep making dives until no more bodies are found.  

If there are submersibles that would work in this effort, perhaps deploy them further down current where bodies may be spread out.

Spin endorsement isn't required until CFI here.

I have spun two planes..one being a glider I think.

I never saw a response from Airbus pilots.  Can a 320 recover from a stall at cruise altitudes?

Is the recovery process similar to that for a Cessna 172?

Yes, the 320 can be recovered at altitude. The original stall philosophy had pilots maintain a pitch attitude just below
stall AOA and fly out of the stall with full power. After the Air France accident the training changed to account for the differences
with a high altitude stall. The new procedures became "memory items" and mirror traditional stall recovery. Pitch down -25 degrees) to break the stall,
allow the plane to accelerate ( may take up to 10,000 feet due to thin air) and then recover smoothly. It's an eye opening maneuver
in the sim as all you see is ground for a while!

It is now reported that he was resetting or removing circuit breakers related to the flight augmentation computer.  I assume the breaker panel is not within reach from his seated position, and that tinkering with the breakers in flight is not a recommended procedure.

There are some folks at airbus industrie who are probably getting very, very nervous right now.

I admit it took me a moment to comprehend where this was going. If true, then this comes to mind.

"Open the pod bay door Hal."
"I'm sorry Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that."


Most tissue is certainly gone, but remember that pathologists identified the remains of the eight crew members found in the Hunley, 140 years after it sank.

Six more QZ8501 crash victims found: Indonesian official

"JAKARTA: Indonesian divers on Monday (Feb 2) found another six victims of the AirAsia plane crash, an official said, taking to 84 the number of bodies retrieved since the accident in late December.

Two bodies were found inside the fuselage of the plane, while another four were located near the wreckage on the bottom of the Java Sea. Another body was located on Sunday as the national search and rescue agency resumed operations."

My memory is that just days ago it was reported that there were no bodies in the fuselage.

Whole lot of WTF on this aircraft. Captain worried about towering thunderstorms and goes in the cabin screwing with some breakers?
Until I hear different I say the cockpit crew screwed the pooch on this one.

there was a very recent airbus system failure that required circuit breakers to be pulled.

Circuit breakers in the cockpit or outside the cockpit?

That's very interesting.
I had it driven into me that no amount of available power could get the aircraft out of 'slow flight' no matter how hard you pushed the throttle.
You have to put the nose down if you want to recover the aircraft and if you don't have the altitude you are going to crash or have a very hard landing.
Of course that may not be the case in a high powered fighter, but I doubt the Airbus in question had enough power to fly it out of a stall or slow flight situation without dropping the nose.

As for the recovery process being similar to a 172, yes it is very similar as it is with most aircraft out there.

Some are out of the cockpit.  IIRC there is some info out there about having to disable two of the three flight computers in some situations to remedy some situations that the flight systems in the scarebus can cause when they go wonky.  


I seriously think it is a very stupid thing to make an aircraft that simply sees the pilots as being part of a think tank.  EG.  the crew is merely suggesting what they want the plane to do,  The flight computers then decides if it could/should/wants to do what the crew wants it to do according to a set of parameters/program.  

Most other aircraft give the crew the ultimate say and suggest to the crew what they should do.  Sort of like saying "this is what I think,  But you are the boss".

At lower altitudes, in every jet I have ever flown, you do NOT lower the nose just jam the go fast sticks to the firewall and power out of it.  At cruise levels is another ballgame.

Six more bodies recovered from QZ8501 wreckage

"JAKARTA: Six more bodies have been recovered from wreckage of AirAsia QZ8501.

This brings the total number of bodies retrieved so far to 90, according to reports from the Associated Press and Xinhua news agency in China."

Unfortunately the way this report is written does not clearly state if the bodies were found in the fuselage or on the sea bed outside of the fuselage.

One AirAsia QZ8501 pilot's body recovered

"JAKARTA: Indonesian search and rescue officials evacuated one of two bodies from the cockpit of the crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 late on Friday (Feb 6) afternoon.

The pilots' heavily decomposed bodies still had their airline uniforms on and were strapped to their seats. The cockpit was located 20 meters away from the fuselage on the seabed of the Java Sea.

As nightfall approached, authorities temporarily called off evacuating the other body in the cockpit and will resume their recovery on Saturday morning."


98 bodies recovered to date.

Recent guidance from the FAA (I know, just repeating) is that type examiners want the stall to be recognized effectively and "aggressively terminated" with pitch down.

I am in recurrent now, I will find out.

Breaking 8 years of no altitude loss muscle memory was a bitch.

Wait, are you in training somewhere?

I would imagine that word "recurrent" would be in reference to "recurrent" training.  

Also known as "recurrency".

Periodic training and recertification as required by the CFR.

We have always done this, but only enough to break the stall, not necessarily descend, unless at altitude.

Yep, new requirements to lower the nose now.  It is hard changing 15 years of "power out of the stall with minimum altitude loss"

Now, I've really only done either regional training, or corporate training, but even clean stalls at altitude were a lower the nose to the horizon, minimum altitude loss, power out of stall maneuver. I think the PTS standards were something like minus 200 feet, plus 50 feet on the maneuver, but that's just a pull from memory.

Source

Indonesia to call off search for AirAsia crash victims

"JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia will on Sunday end a search for the bodies of 56 people missing from an AirAsia jet that crashed in the Java Sea in December, a national rescue agency official said.

AirAsia flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control during bad weather less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore on Dec. 28. All 162 people on board the Airbus A320 were killed.

"Some of our ships and personnel have been pulled back already and some remain on standby, but officially the operation will be finished on Sunday," Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for the search and rescue agency, told Reuters."