Pilot error, faulty navigation system blamed for crash

Jakarta: An Indonesian pilot shouted "This is crazy!" seconds before his jetliner plunged into the sea last year, killing all 102 people on board, according to an investigation yesterday that blamed his errors and a faulty navigation system for the crash.

"This is really bad. It is starting to fly like a bamboo ship," said one of the two pilots before the Boeing 737 crashed, according to comments captured by the cockpit voice recorder. "Pull up. Pull up. Pull up!" were his last recorded words.

The National Transportation Safety Committee, in a report issued yesterday, said 154 recurring defects in the planes navigation system were reported in the months leading up to the disaster, and that low-cost carrier Adam Air failed to properly address those reports or train its pilots to deal with them.

Last week, the government revoked Adam Air's operating licence because of its poor safety record.

The plane was flying from the main island of Java to an airport in the east of Indonesia on New Year's Day when it spiralled from the sky at a height of 10,000 metres. It took about two minutes to hit the sea, the report said.

Floating wreckage

Several days passed before fisherman and navy boats discovered wreckage from the plane floating on the ocean.

Both flight data recorders were eventually recovered from the sea bed, but the plane's mostly intact fuselage remains there.

Initially, the pilots reported a problem with the navigation system but were unconcerned.

Just 20 minutes before the crash, they made a joke about it along with other "jovial comments," the report said. But in the course of trying to fix the navigation system, the jetliner's autopilot disengaged, causing the jetliner to bank to the right.

The report said the pilots were apparently unaware they were now flying the plane and ignored "a number of initial alerts, warnings and changes to displays" indicating the jetliner's increasingly critical situation.

"Both pilots became engrossed with the trouble shooting Inertial Reference System anomalies for at least the last 13 minutes of the flight, with minimal regard to other flight requirements," the report said.

"The pilots did not detect and appropriately arrest the descent soon enough to prevent loss of control."

The report said the pilots had no training on what to do if the IRS system failed, nor if the autopilot unexpectedly disengaged. It said they made several wrong decisions in the seconds after the autopilot was turned off.

The accident was one of a spate in Indonesia in recent years, including one involving the national carrier Garuda that killed 21.