Lets face it, last few years were too good to be true. Though having so many at short span of time is worrying.
Nope.. Aircraft don't just fall out of the sky. Still the safest means to travel.. African airlines have been facing issues with quality of Maintenance and repair carrying out. Spurious parts, lack of proper maintenance, cost cutting etc have all made flying these airlines unsafe. In this scenario however, it seems that bad weather was also a contributing factor to the crash. What was appaling was the amount if time it took for them to figure out that an Aircraft is missing. --- Double Post Merged, Jul 25, 2014 --- One of the Flight data recorders have been recovered at the crash site.
According to initial reports the aircraft fell from a height of 10,000 meters in about 3 minutes. That's 3 km per minute or 50 meters per second (vertically). This can be caused by a storm. But the mystery still remains that in those 3 minutes why any call for Mayday was not sent or recovery if attempted.