Indonesian jet's problems known

Black box recorded malfunctions on final four flights

Daniel Putut Kuncoro Adi (left), director of safety and security of Lion Air, talks to relatives of the victims of the crashed Lion Air jet as President Director Edward Sirait (center) and founder and owner of the airline Rusdi Kirana listen during a news conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Monday.
Daniel Putut Kuncoro Adi (left), director of safety and security of Lion Air, talks to relatives of the victims of the crashed Lion Air jet as President Director Edward Sirait (center) and founder and owner of the airline Rusdi Kirana listen during a news conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Monday.

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- The "black box" data recorder from a crashed Lion Air jet shows its airspeed indicator malfunctioned on its last four flights, investigators said Monday, just hours after distraught relatives of victims confronted the airline's co-founder at a meeting organized by officials.

National Transportation Safety Committee chairman Soerjanto Tjahjono said the problem was similar on each of the four flights, including the fatal flight Oct. 29 in which the plane plunged into the Java Sea minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.

Erratic speed and altitude on the plane's previous flight, from Denpasar on Bali to Jakarta, were widely reported and "when we opened the black box, yes indeed the technical problem was the airspeed or the speed of the plane," Tjahjono said at a news conference.

"Data from the black box showed that two flights before Denpasar-Jakarta also experienced the same problem," he said. "In the black box there were four flights that experienced problems with the airspeed indicator."

Airspeed indicators have been around for decades to tell pilots how fast they are flying. They are paired with separate indicators measuring the degree to which the nose is pointed up, down or level.

Pilots train in simulators to learn how to notice potentially faulty readings and work around them. They learn the normal power settings and attitude, or nose-up and nose-down settings, for each of the various phases of a flight. A problem with the airspeed system should not result in a crash under most circumstances, according to safety experts.

"If you were driving down the interstate and the speedometer failed, would you expect to crash the car?" said John Cox, a former airline pilot and now a safety consultant. He said a faulty airspeed system might have contributed to the crash, but that based on what is known so far, it shouldn't be considered the cause of the crash.

Safety experts said investigators will look at why Lion Air didn't ground the plane if it experienced recurring problems with the sensors and subject it to more rigorous inspection and testing until the problem was fixed.

Indonesian investigators; the plane's manufacturer, Boeing; and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are formulating a more specific inspection for Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes related to the airspeed problem, Tjahjono said.

"If there are urgent findings to be delivered, we will convey them to the operators and to the manufacturer," he said.

Lion Air has said a technical problem with the jet was fixed after problems with the Bali to Jakarta flight.

Investigator Nurcahyo Utomo said investigators need to review maintenance records, including what problems were reported, what repairs were done including whether components were replaced, and how the repairs were tested before the 2-month-old plane was declared airworthy.

"Currently we are looking for the cause of problem," he said "Whether the trouble came from its indicator, its measuring device or sensor, or a problem with its computer. This is what we do not know yet and we will find it out," he said.

At the meeting with family members, Tjahjono had said that information downloaded from the jet's flight data recorder was consistent with reports that the plane's speed and altitude were erratic after takeoff on its final flight. Searchers are still trying to locate the cockpit voice recorder.

Rusdi Kirana, Lion Air's co-founder, was not invited to speak by Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi, who moderated the meeting between relatives and the officials who are overseeing the search effort and accident investigation.

But he stood and bowed his head after angry and distraught family members demanded that Kirana, who with his brother Kusnan Kirana founded Lion Air in 1999, identify himself.

"Lion Air has failed," said a man who identified himself as the father of passenger Shandy Johan Ramadhan, a prosecutor in a district on the island where the flight was headed.

"I want Mr. Rusdi Kirana and his team to pay attention," he said. "Since the time of the crisis, I was never contacted by Lion Air. We lost our child, but there was no empathy that Lion Air showed to us."

After the meeting, Kirana left in a hurry, avoiding questions from reporters.

Many families face an agonizing wait for missing relatives to be identified. Police medical experts have received nearly 140 body bags of human remains and have identified 14 victims.

Tjahjono said the large amount of small debris and the relatively small area the debris was found in showed the plane hit the water at a very high speed.

"The plane was intact when it plunged to the sea, it did not explode in the air, and the aircraft engine was running when it touched the water at high RPM -- it's marked by the loss of all blades of the turbine," he said.

Information for this article was contributed by David Koenig of The Associated Press.

A Section on 11/06/2018

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