Everyone seems to have comments on flight 8501, so why shouldn't I? Well, I do. What do we know? The plane crashed. There was very bad weather. The pilot tried to climb. Given those facts, what are the most likely possibilities?
First, bad weather. The plane was flying at about 35,000 feet which is about average for a plane like this. The thunder storms often are as tall as 80,000 feet so it is very likely that the pilot could not fly over the weather. If the weather was on the extreme side, the air would be warm and rising with a lot of moisture and of very low density. We all understand that our cars do not have as much power when driven in high mountains and it is the same with airplanes. Planes have altitude limits due to the efficiency of the engines and the lift of the wings. The climb rate is very much less at high altitudes due to air density. Trying to climb would have been one of the worst decisions that the pilot could have made. The chances of a high altitude "stall" would be very likely.
Next, how planes work. Look at the design of modern airplanes. This whole business of designing more sophisticated planes is that the improvements come at a cost. Look at the wings. They do not have much lift and depend on big flaps to help them fly at lower landing speeds. The wings alone can only provide enough lift if the plane is able to fly fast enough. This brings us to the next question.
Air speed is not the same thing as ground speed. As the air gets thinner and thinner given the same ground speed, the air speed goes "down". If the air speed goes too low, the plane stalls. The pilot only has two choices to prevent this from happening. Dive the plane or increase power. There is one other complication and that is "icing". If the plane gets ice on the wings, all bets are off regarding stall speed. If the plane has icing the stall speed has to be higher than normal. There is no way for the pilot to know exactly what the required air speed is. He can only guess.
More on the weather. We hear on the weather news that, "there were hail stones as big as baseballs". In a big thunder storm, there are often hail stones in the clouds that do not ever hit the ground. If the plane were to have encountered some of these, it could have affected the engines, the wings or control surfaces. Again, all bets are off.
Finally, what do you think would happen if a plane were to be hit by a hail stone the size of a baseball at 300 mph? It would be like being hit by a cannon. This plane was a fiberglass plane without much redundant structural strength, be cause it was "well" engineered. At sea level the air pressure is about 14 psi and I think that they keep the plane pressurized at about 10 psi. If the air pressure on the outside were very low due to the storm, it could be as low as 5 psi for a few seconds. Now look at a window on the plane that was 12" x 24". How much force do you think would be on that window? Would you believe 1,440 #? Under those special conditions, a door or a window could have blown out.
It seems clear that the pilot had no business flying into or trying to fly over that storm. He should have turned back regardless of the instructions from the ground or other planes in the area. He had onboard radar to help to prevent hitting an other plane and should have put his trust in that system. If the other pilots were smart, they would not have been in the area anyway.
It will be interesting to find out what actually happened and see if my ideas are correct.
PS----New data on the plane. It has some special system to determine the angle of attack that is used by the autopilot to prevent a stall. The problem is that a little ice will cause the system to produce bad data and thus cause the autopilot to take the "wrong" action. By the time the pilot figures out that the autopilot is "wrong", it is too late. Look at a typical 10 hour flight. The autopilot is flying the plane all but the first five and the last five minutes. This means that a pilot with 5,000 hours of flight time only really has 83.3 hours of time flying the plane. I have a lot more flying time than that.
