by Scott Creighton (H/T Brian)
Quietly spinning away on the back-burner, the story of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 is circling the drain of the memory hole. Like Malaysian Airlines 370 and Flight 17 before it, the official story of what happened to Flight 8501 will only be partially written on less than shaky evidence.
It was announced yesterday by the Indonesian military, who are heading up the recovery effort, that efforts to retrieve the fuselage of Flight 8501 have failed in a dramatic fashion (captured on film by a handy TV crew) and the wreckage sank back to the “bottom of the sea” never to be seen again (except on a clear day when you can see it from a fishing boat floating above it)
The Indonesian military said Tuesday that it was stopping its efforts to recover the remains of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 almost a month after the commercial jet crashed into the sea…
Over the weekend, navy divers tried to lift part of the fuselage of the plane using wire ropes and giant balloons. But the attempts failed after lines attached to the wreckage broke.
An effort to lift a smaller piece of wreckage was also unsuccessful, the military said…
The chief of the Indonesian armed forces, Gen. Moeldoko, on Tuesday ordered the military teams involved in the operation to pull out, said military spokesman Manahan Simorangkir.
Officials said that 19 of the 81 navy divers working on the recovery efforts had fallen ill with decompression sickness and would be taken for treatment at a hospital in Jakarta, the capital. CNN
It’s only in 28-30 meters of water which should make it one of the easiest recovery missions in history of aviation disasters. That’s 80 – 90 feet.
TWA Flight 800 which was shot out of the sky, landed in water roughly 120 feet deep. 95% of that plane was recovered and reconstructed in order to assess what happened to it. And they still ended up lying about it. There’s a great documentary on the subject.
From what I understand, it’s pretty difficult for trained professional divers to develop decompression sickness in 90 feet of water. Even remaining down there for prolonged periods of time, professional divers should know how to offset the risks and the depth isn’t very extreme.
Seems to me like they used the 19 divers getting sick to justify calling off the recovery operation. Also seems to me like someone really doesn’t want that plane pulled out of the water.
Kinda like Flight 370.
In the video posted below you can that moment when the fuselage is being dragged up onto the ship and the cable breaks allowing it to slip back down to the “bottom of the sea”
You can also see two key things:
The weather is not bad at all and the seas are not rough.
They tried pulling it up onto the ship in such a way that it would naturally bind on the edge of the boat, unable to pivot. The cable was set at almost a right angle, rather than being positioned above to lift it out of the water and up onto the ship.
What can we derive from those observations?
They are lying about conditions.
They broke that cable on purpose so the film crew could record their half-asses effort and the piece sinking back to it’s final resting place.
Now you might ask what the hell I know about such things.
Well, for starters, I attended Mountain Productions rigging school in 1998.
I was a lead rigger for Showman Fabricators for several years and lead on the install of MSNBC’s studio in Secaucus NJ. I helped design lifts, pick points and the rigging necessary for major structural elements of the set.
Pictured above is the catwalk. It’s basically like a balcony bridge made of steel and plexiglass. It weighed roughly 3 tons once assembled and then flown via hoists until it’s legs could be attached.
This is the “thunderdome” as we called it. A rather large curved aluminum wall unit with 3 layers of drywall skim-coated for a ultra-fine finish suitable for use as a projection screen.
That’s just one project I worked on. There have been others.
The point I’m trying to make here is, I know a little about rigging. But common sense should tell you who ever was in charge of that extraction operation either didn’t know what he was doing… or he deliberately allowed that piece of crucial evidence to bind on the side of that ship until either the cable broke or whatever it was attacked to did.
It was a show. They never had any intention of pulling that piece out of the water.
Look at this still frame I took from the video.
(Redline) Notice where the pick point is. It’s low on the deck so it would naturally cause a bind when the object came out of the water. It would bind on the side of the ship as the hoist tries to force the object to teeter on the edge and raise the full weight of the rest of the object up out of the water in a straight line with the ship. There’s no way that would happen.
(Green Arrows)Notice the edge of the ship has an opening which is smaller that the object they are trying to pull through it (Blue Lines).
Notice all the deckhands have been ordered off the deck as if they knew that cable was going to break.
That was never going to work. There’s no way possible it could have.
This was not a salvage operation, it was a dog and pony show for the cameras.
In another interesting development, the initial crash investigation report will not include data from the black boxes.
A preliminary report into last month’s crash of an AirAsia passenger jet that killed 162 people will not include an analysis of the black box flight recorders, an Indonesian investigator said on Tuesday. Straight Times
How is that possible? In a case like this the data from the black boxes are pretty much the only thing you have to go on, since they can’t seem to ever be able to recover that plane from 90 feet of water. Oh wait, I’m sorry, from the “bottom of the sea”
This is Gen. Moeldoko. He’s the same guy who called off the search after rigging-dofus screwed up the lift. Tell me how honest he looks. Would you let him look after your 10-year-old boy for the weekend?
As a result of Flight 8501 dropping unexpectedly into the Java Sea, a new system of safely ratings are going to be implemented by Indonesia. You can expect them to target state-owned Malaysian Airlines in an effort to devalue and eventually bankrupt the carrier. Tony Fernandez would have it no other way.
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