JAKARTA – An Indonesian investigator on Thursday said the AirAsia plane that crashed into the sea in December was being flown by the co-pilot.
The chief investigator at the National Transport Safety Committee, Mardjono Siswosuwarno, told
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newsmen.
“The second-in-command was the flying pilot while the captain was the monitoring pilot,’’ Siswosuwarno said.
AirAsia said earlier that the Indonesian captain had 20,537 flying hours, 6,100 of them logged with the airline, while the co-pilot was a French national with 2,275 flying hours.
Mardjono said that the plane was airworthy and was operated within “the envelope of the weight and balance limits’’.
“The pilots talked normally, indicating that they were in good health,’’ he said.
Flight QZ8501 was en route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore when it crashed into the Java Sea on Dec. 28, killing all 162 people on board.
He said the cockpit voice recorder indicated that the co-pilot was at the helm since take-off and that such a practice was common.
Mardjono said the Airbus A320-200 made contact with air traffic control in Jakarta at 6:12 am to request permission to ascend to an altitude of 38,000 feet from 32,000.
“Air traffic control told the pilot to stand by and four minutes later gave the clearance to climb to 34,000 feet,’’ he said.
Mardjono confirmed an earlier statement by Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan that the plane climbed abnormally, from 32,000 feet to 37,000 feet in just 30 seconds, causing the plane to experience an aerodynamic stall and descended back to 32,000 feet before crashing.
Report says the normal climb rate is 1,000-2,000 feet per minute.
The cockpit voice recorders and the flight data recorder stopped operating at 6:20.
“We do not know what happened after that,’’ he said. (dpa/NAN)
