AFP, Jakarta :
Faulty equipment and the crew’s “inability to control the aircraft” caused an AirAsia A320 to crash into the Java Sea last year, killing all 162 people onboard, an Indonesian report said Tuesday.
Flight QZ8501 plunged into the ocean in stormy weather on December 28, during what was supposed to be a routine flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.
The crash of the Airbus A320-200 triggered a huge international search, with ships and aircraft from several nations involved in a lengthy hunt that was hampered by strong currents and bad weather.
The bodies of 56 of those who died have never been found.
In their final report into the accident released Tuesday, Indonesia’s official National Transportation Safety Committee said poor maintenance and a fault with the system that helps control the rudder’s movement was a major contributing factor into the crash.
Cracked soldering in the component caused it to malfunction and send repeated warning messages to the pilots, it said.
When they received the fourth warning, the pilots tried to reset a computer system but also turned off the plane’s autopilot, sending it into a sharp roll from which they were unable to recover.
“Subsequent flight crew action resulted in inability to control the aircraft,” said the report. The plane went into a “prolonged stall condition that was beyond the capability of the crew to recover”, it said.
The report said the faulty component, the Rudder Travel Limiter, had suffered 23 problems in the past 12 months, citing maintenance records.
It said that maintenance records were “unable to identify repetitive defects and analyse their consequences”.
