AirAsia Flight QZ8501 climbed to an unauthorized altitude fast and steep before the aircraft fell into the ocean, Indonesian investigators said in their first description of the last moments of the ill-fated plane.
From a cruising altitude of 9,754m, the Airbus A320 plane ascended to 11,400m in 30 seconds as pilots probably tried to avoid bad weather, Ertata Lananggalih, an investigator at the National Transportation Safety Committee, said yesterday in Jakarta.
The aircraft then descended slowly for three minutes before it disappeared, he said.
Photo: Reuters
“The pilots were conscious when the maneuver happened,” Lananggalih said. “They were trying to control the airplane.”
The copilot, with 2,247 hours of flying experience, was at the controls and communicating with the ground, while the captain, an experienced officer with 20,537 hours of service, was monitoring, said Mardjono Siswosuwarno, the lead investigator of the crash that killed 162 people. The aircraft, operated by the Indonesian affiliate of Malaysia-based AirAsia, disappeared from radar on Dec. 28 en route to Singapore from Surabaya.
Indonesia will not release a preliminary report on its investigation into Flight 8501 because fact-findings could change rapidly, committee head Tatang Kurniadi said.
Indonesia sent the preliminary findings to all countries involved in the investigation on Wednesday, Kurniadi said.
The pilots had sought permission from the air traffic control to turn left and then to ascend to 11,582m from a stable 9,754m because of clouds.
Four minutes after the request was made, the ground cleared the pilots to let the plane climb to an altitude of 11,400m, he said.
Satellite imagines showed storm clouds that reached as high as 13,411m, investigators said.
The aircraft was in “good condition,” Siswosuwarno said.
Indonesian authorities have so far recovered only 70 bodies from the search, which still has not managed to lift the fuselage of the single-aisle jet. The tail section of the plane has been retrieved. Indonesia’s military pulled out of the search this week.
The cockpit-voice recorder played out the pilots’ voices and no explosion was heard, Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator with the committee, said last week. The flight-data recorder captured 1,200 parameters and the voice recorder captured two hours and four minutes of the aircraft’s final journey, the investigators said. The two devices are called the black box. After studying data from the black box, authorities ruled out terrorism as a factor that brought down the plane.
Flight 8501 appeared to have stalled after climbing steeply, Indonesian Minister of Transportation Ignasius Jonan said earlier this month. A stall is a situation in which the flow of air under the wing is disrupted, causing a loss of lift.
Indonesia has said it intends to shut the agency responsible for coordinating aircraft flight slots in three months. That was after the AirAsia flight took off on a Sunday, without a Ministry of Transportation permit to fly that day.
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