transitional period if you don t have enough air speed that s a bad position to be in. it s called coffin corner. where you stalled and no recovery. we just want to emphasize we don t know if that s exactly what happened here. but if it were a wing stall that happened what causes that? if you remember as a kid and i used to do this all the time driving down the highway sticking your handout the window. as long as your hand is going in this direction you re in. if you go like this the wind is very strong against you and very difficult to control where your hand is in that wind. this is very similar to that. the wing when in its at the right flight altitude the air is going over there smoothly. when the angle of the attack goes against the wind to such an area where the air behind it starts to burble and breaks that suction, now you take that amount of air you feel on this
they were in a stall. and then you also have the issue if it s difficult in an airliner like this to recover from a stall, right? well the problem is when you re flying at those altitudes, the difference between too slow and too fast is perilously close. it s a very narrow margin of safe flight. the term is coffin corner. i think that s an obvious term and you can understand what that is about. it s a very narrow envelope of flight as it were. so when you re in a thunderstorm at altitude and you are buffeted by wind and turbulence and you might be struck by hail and deluged by so much rainfall that it could cause an engine to fail any of that can occur. you could be struck by lightning, momentarilyblinded by that.
it. coffin corner is what we ll examine this morning. fundamentally what it means is that the cruise speed and the stall speed differential at very high altitude at which this particular aircraft is flying is very, very small. this is why most aircraft at 37,000 feet 33,000 feet are flown in an automated fashion. in severe turbulence that stall speed can inadvertently be exceeded. we know that airasia was in an area of moderate to severe turbulence. the question is did they suffer a high altitude stall or did they suffer a power outage of some type and glide 100 miles, which would be the proper glide speed from 33,000 feet to a landing that the passengers could survive. there are several things that are going to give us the