The passengers and crew on board the ill-fated AirAsia flight QZ8501 may have been unconscious before the plane hit waters off the coast of Borneo, aviation experts say.
As the grim recovery mission for the 155 passengers and seven crew continues, questions are being asked about why the pilot flew the plane into a thunderstorm and what could have been done to avert the crash.
Australian-based aviation security expert Desmond Ross said it was impossible to be "100 per cent certain that the thunderstorm is what caused the accident", although that was "possible and maybe even likely".
"It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that something else happened as well," he said.
"It could possibly have been a mechanical failure or an explosion. It could have been some catastrophic failure which caused it. Coincidences happen."
He said the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder - sometimes called "black boxes", although they are bright orange - would help identify the cause of the crash.
Mr Ross, who lived in Jakarta for ten years, said "thunderstorms and the weather that they're experiencing at the moment is a fact of life...and it's there now for a couple of months".
Pilots in the region had to contend with bad weather "every day that they fly", he said, and the co-pilots of AirAsia flight QZ8501 would not have flown voluntarily into a bad thunderstorm that "could virtually tear [the plane] apart".
It is not yet clear whether the aircraft broke up mid-air because of a violent thunderstorm or whether it hit the waters around the Karimata Strait, off the coast of Borneo, virtually intact and broke up on impact.
If the plane broke up at altitude, the cabin would have depressurised and the lack of oxygen would have meant the passengers were unconscious before the plane hit the water.
Associate Professor Geoff Dell, the leader of accident investigation and forensics at Central Queensland University, said commercial planes were not built to fly through thunderstorms.
"People don't realise how violent the inside of a thunderstorm cell is," he said. "Aviators stay away from them with a passion."
He said it was possible that the thunderstorm "destroyed the aeroplane" by breaking a part such as a wing or the tail, which would create a "controllability nightmare".
"If you're in severe turbulence and then bouncing around all over the place...[the plane is] almost uncontrollable," he said.
Associate professor Dell said he would be "very surprised" if the passengers and crew were conscious by the time the plane hit the water.
Experts agree the co-pilots would have been focusing on avoiding the crash in the minutes before the plane hit the water, which is why they may not have made a mayday call. It is also possible they misjudged the severity of the storm.
Aviation expert Neil Hansford, of Strategic Aviation Solutions, said the area over the Java Sea where the plane vanished was known as the "thunderstorm factory".
"Once the aircraft starts to fall...the pressurisation would go and they'd go to sleep very quickly, so I don't think they would have endured very much," he said.
