Faulty rudder system major factor in AirAsia crash which killed 162 passengers

What: AirAsia Airbus A320-200 crashed into the Java Sea a year ago in stormy weather, killing all 162 people onboard.

Investigators said a system controlling rudder movement had cracked soldering that malfunctioned repeatedly, including four times during the flight alone, and 23 times the previous year, the Reuters news agency reported from the Indonesian capital.

Soerjanto and crash investigators said they did not have audio or video evidence to determine who may have reset the computer’s circuit breaker.

At this point, the conditions were beyond the capabilities of the pilot to return the plane to normal conditions.

An official from the National Transportation Safety Committee said that analysis of the flight data recorder showed that warning signs had popped up four times due to disturbances in the rudder control system after the plane departed for the two-hour flight.

“The [co-pilot] might have been startled when he realized the unusual attitude of the aircraft, as indicated by the [black box] record of self-expression”.

Experts say an outage of the so-called Flight Augmentation Computers would not directly cause the plane to crash, but without them, pilots would have to rely on manual flying skills that are often stretched during a sudden airborne emergency.

Minutes later, the plane disappeared from radar.

About 40 minutes after the plane left Surabaya, the pilots had asked air traffic control for approval to climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet in order to avoid a storm.

“The most interesting part that could be heard from the CVR is that whenever the plane went up, the captain said “pull down.’…”

My personal opinion is that on a scale of 1 to 10 for a good accident investigation report, 10 being very good, I put this report as a 5.

“Weather conditions and engine problems were not a factor in the downing of the Airbus 320”, Soerjanto said.

The AirAsia passenger jet crash that claimed 162 lives past year was because of a faulty component and the crew’s subsequent attempts to fix it.

AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes said on Twitter that the airline would not leave “any stone unturned” to make sure that lessons were learned from the accident.

Gerry Soejatman, an aviation consultant with Jakarta-based consultancy CommunicAvia, said both the AirAsia crash and AF447 had happened after a technical problem followed by the plane stalling.