The discovery of the AirAsia airliner’s fuselage in the Java Sea raises new questions about what caused the crash. Possible versions range from misread instruments leading to a stall to a murder-suicide.
AirAsia flight QZ8501 abruptly went off radar on Sunday over the Java Sea shortly after the pilot requested air control in Jakarta for permission to climb higher to avoid a storm. The permission was granted two minutes later, but no response from the crew followed.
The plane disappeared from radar screens three minutes later. No distress call was sent by the plane. Both facts indicated that it fell very quickly, with initial speculation saying that it could have suffered catastrophic destruction in mid-air. But the discovery of the plane’s body lying in one piece on the seabed proved otherwise.
Recovering data from flight and cockpit recorders would be crucial for establishing the truth about the fate of QZ8501, but some flight experts point out that the AirAsia Airbus A320 crash has similarities with another flight incident, that of Air France flight AF447 in 2009.
The plane was officially classed as missing for two years and was found only in 2011. The investigation showed instruments called pitot tubes froze and gave false airspeed readings to the crew. They failed to respond to the problem accordingly and didn’t notice that the plane was about to stall or to try to recover it.
No two accidents are the same. But there are similar conditions like the weather, and we must look into it very closely,” a former air crash investigator in Indonesia told Reuters.
Unlike the AirAsia flight crash, Air France airliner stalled at nighttime when the crew couldn’t see the horizon line and see that the aircraft was losing altitude.
QZ8501 was piloted by an experienced 53-year-old ex-Indonesian Air Force pilot known by the single name Iriyanto, who had 20,000 flying hours under his belt, including 6,100 hours in Airbuses. The co-pilot was Frenchman Remi Plesel with 2,275 flying hours.
AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes expressed confidence in his pilot, saying he was one of the best graduates at his military flight school. The Airbus A320 is a reliable aircraft with just 0.14 fatal accidents per million takeoffs, according to a safety study published by Boeing in August. With neither human error nor technical failure immediately pinned down as a likely cause, more sinister theories about the crash have arisen.
The plane could have been damaged by a small bomb exploding onboard, John Nance, a former US Air Force pilot, told ABC News.
“Maybe one that wasn’t strong enough to blow the airplane into pieces at altitude, but maybe one that blew the control cables from the hydraulics,” he said.
An even more exotic version would be a deliberate crash by the pilot in a murder-suicide, Nance added. At least three crashes in the past 20 years were caused by this.
One example is SilkAir Flight 185, also from Indonesia, which crashed into a river in southern Sumatra in 1997. Indonesian investigators reported that they couldn’t collect conclusive evidence to rule on the cause of the incident.
But the US National Transportation Safety Board, which participated in the investigation because the aircraft in question was a Boeing 737, said the plane crashed due to deliberate input from the cockpit, most likely by the captain.