SINGAPORE/JAKARTA/PARIS, Jan 31: The captain of the AirAsia jet that crashed into the sea in December was out of his seat conducting an unorthodox procedure when his co-pilot apparently lost control, and by the time he returned it was too late to save the plane, two people familiar with the investigation said.
Details emerging of the final moments of Flight QZ8501 are likely to focus attention partly on maintenance, procedures and training, though Indonesian officials have stressed publicly that it is too early to draw any firm conclusions. The Airbus A320 jet plunged into the Java Sea while en route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore on December 28, killing all 162 people on board.
It had been suffering maintenance faults with a key flight control computer for over a week, and one person familiar with the matter said the captain had flown on the same plane with the intermittently faulty device just days before the crash. AirAsia said it would not comment while the matter was under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) of Indonesia.
Reuters reported this week that maintenance problems on the Flight Augmentation Computer (FAC), and the way the pilots reacted to them, were at the heart of the investigation. After trying to reset this device, pilots pulled a circuit-breaker to cut its power, Bloomberg News reported yesterday.
People familiar with the matter told Reuters it was the Indonesian captain Iriyanto who took this step, rather than his less experienced French co-pilot Remy Plesel, who was flying the plane.
The outage would not directly upset the aircraft but would remove flight envelope protection, which prevents a pilot from taking a plane beyond its safety limits, leaving the junior pilot to fly the jet manually in delicate high altitude conditions. The decision to cut off the FAC has surprised people following the investigation because the usual procedure for resetting it is to press a button on the overhead panel. (AGENCIES)
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