A preliminary report into AirAsia Flight QZ8501, which crashed into the Java Sea last month, killing 162 people, will not include an analysis of the black box flight recorders, an Indonesian investigator said yesterday.
The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) is due to submit its initial findings this week to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on AirAsia’s first fatal crash.
The Airbus SAS A320-200 vanished from radar screens on Dec. 28 last year, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-biggest city, to Singapore. There were no survivors.
Photo: Reuters
A multinational search and recovery operation has recovered 70 bodies so far and hoped to find more after locating the fuselage of the plane.
However, days of rough weather and poor underwater visibility have hampered navy divers’ efforts.
The preliminary report, which the ICAO requires within 30 days of the date of the accident, will include “information on the plane, the number of passengers and other information like that,” NTSC investigator Suryanto told reporters.
It will not include analysis from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, both of which were recovered by divers from the bottom of the Java Sea.
Data from radar and the aircraft’s two “black box” flight recorders is providing investigators with a clearer picture of what occurred during the final minutes of Flight QZ8501.
Indonesian Minister of Transportation Ignasius Jonan told a parliamentary hearing last week that, based on radar data, the plane had climbed faster than normal in its final minutes and then stalled.
The NTSC is set to hold an annual media conference this week to talk about the agency’s achievements over the past year. The agency is not expected to discuss details of its investigation into the AirAsia crash, NTSC head Tatang Kurniadi said.
The final report on the investigation, which is to be made public, must be filed within a year.
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