AirAsia crash: Faulty part and crew error caused fatal crash

Disaster: the doomed AirAsia flight
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Hannah Al-Othman1 December 2015

A well-known rudder system fault and the pilots seemingly ignoring a warning contributed to the Air Asia crash that killed 162 people in December last year, Indoneisan officals say.

The doomed plane plunged into the Java Sea on December 28, 40 minutes into the flight from Surabaya to Singapore.

Following a year-long investigation, officials indentified a fault with the plane's rudder control system, which sent warning alerts to the pilots repeatedly, that had contributed to the crash.

The glitch was a pre-existing fault known to AirAsia maintenance crew, a press conference in Indonesia heard.

The investigation concluded that crew error had also contributed to the disaster, after the pilots responded to the warning alerts by resetting the system.

The same method had been used previously to address the fault, but the reset caused the autopilot system to disengage, and the plane to roll, investigators said.

When the pilots were unable to stablilise the aircraft it stalled before crashing into the sea.

At the time of the crash it was thought that bad weather could have been a contributing factor, but this appears to have been ruled out.

In a report, Indonesia’s National Transport Safety Committee said: “Subsequent flight crew action resulted in inability to control the aircraft... causing the aircraft to depart from the normal flight envelope and enter a prolonged stall condition that was beyond the capability of the flight crew to recover.”

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