Indonesia plane crash: throttle may have been faulty, says report

A malfunctioning automatic throttle may have caused the pilots of a Sriwijaya Air jet to lose control, leading to the Boeing 737-500’s plunge into the Java Sea last month, Indonesian investigators have said.

National transportation safety committee investigators said on Wednesday they are still struggling to understand why the jet nosedived into the water minutes after taking off from Jakarta on 9 January, killing all 62 people on board.

The investigators issued a preliminary report that provided new details of the pilots’ struggle to fly the plane almost as soon as it became airborne.

The lead investigator, Nurcahyo Utomo, said the left engine’s throttle lever moved backwards on its own while autopilot was engaged, reducing the power output of that engine before the jet plunged into the sea.

He said pilots of previous flights had reported problems with the automatic throttle system on the 26-year-old jet.

The pilots’ last conversation with air traffic control was about four minutes after takeoff, when the crew responded to an instruction to go up to 13,000 feet (4km). The plane’s flight-data recorder showed the plane reached an altitude of 10,900 feet (3.3km) and then began declining, Utomo said.

While on autopilot, power to the left engine was reduced, while the right engine’s power remained steady. The pilot fought to bring the plane up, but it rolled on to its left side, Utomo said. A minute later the data recorder showed the automatic throttle had been disengaged as the plane pitched down. The flight-data recorder stopped recording a few seconds later.

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Divers were able to recover the crashed plane’s flight-data recorder, which tracks hundreds of parameters showing how the plane was being operated, but were unable to find the memory unit from the cockpit voice recorder, which could tell investigators what the pilots were doing – or failing to do – to regain control of the plane during the brief, erratic flight. The module apparently broke away from other parts of the voice recorder during the crash.

Investigators are working with Boeing and the engine maker General Electric to review the information from the flight-data recorder. A team from the US National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration has also joined the investigation.

Indonesia plane crash map

The plane had been out of service for almost nine months last year because of flight cuts caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Regulators and the airline said it underwent inspections before resuming commercial flights in December.

The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia’s aviation industry, which grew quickly after the economy was opened after the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in the late 1990s. The US banned Indonesian carriers from operating in the country in 2007, lifting the action in 2016, citing improvements in compliance with international aviation standards. The EU lifted a similar ban in 2018.

Sriwijaya Air has had only minor safety incidents in the past, though a farmer was killed in 2008 when a plane went off the runway while landing due to a problem with hydraulics.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air crashed, killing 189 people. An automated flight-control system played a role in that crash, but the Sriwijaya Air jet did not have that system on board.