The commercial jet lost contact with air traffic controllers on December 28 as it flew from the Indonesian city of Surabaya toward Singapore with 162 people on board.
Amid increasingly bad weather, one of the pilots had requested to deviate from the plane's planned route, AirAsia has said. And experts have speculated since Day One that storms might have played a role in the plane crash.If the plane was climbing at 6,000 feet per minute, Schiavo said, numerous alarms would have sounded in the cockpit. But if the aircraft got caught in an updraft, she said, the pilots might not have been aware at first of why it was climbing so quickly when they weren't inputting that into the controls.