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Adam Air crash blamed on pilot error, poor maintenance+
[March 25, 2008]

Adam Air crash blamed on pilot error, poor maintenance+


(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) JAKARTA, March 25_(Kyodo) _ Indonesia's transportation safety body said Tuesday its investigation has found that pilot error and poor maintenance caused last year's crash of an Adam Air plane that killed all 102 people on board.



The Boeing 737-400 went down in the sea off South Sulawesi Province on Jan. 1 last year in one of the country's worst air disasters.

Tatang Kurniadi, chairman of the National Committee of Transportation Safety, told a press conference that the plane's cockpit voice recorder showed that in the final minutes of the flight both of the pilots were preoccupied with fixing the navigation system, known as the inertial reference system.


"When one of the pilots was trying to repair the IRS, the other should fly the aircraft manually, but both were busy repairing the IRS and only depended on the autopilot system," Kurniadi said.

According to the committee's report, however, pilot error disabled the autopilot, causing the plane to slowly bank to the right.

"The pilots did not detect and appropriately arrest the descent quickly enough to prevent loss of control," it said.

The report further said that the airline did not provide their pilots with training to correct IRS malfunctions in accordance with the Airplane Upset Recovery Training Aid developed by Boeing and Airbus.

The report also revealed that pilot reports and maintenance records showed that between October and December 2006, 154 recurring defects related in the navigation system had been reported but were ignored.

Copyright ? 2008 Kyodo News International, Inc.

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