The “black box” data recorder from a crashed Lion Air jet shows its last four flights all had an airspeed indicator problem, investigators said Monday, after distraught relatives of victims confronted the airline’s co-founder at a meeting organized by officials.
National Transportation Safety Committee chairman Soerjanto Tjahjono said the problem was similar on each of the four flights, including the fatal flight on Oct. 29 in which the plane plunged into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
Problems with the plane’s previous flight, from Denpasar on Bali to Jakarta, were widely reported and “when we opened the black box, yes indeed the technical problem was the airspeed or the speed of the plane,” Tjahjono told a news conference.
“Data from the black box showed that two flights before Denpasar-Jakarta also experienced the same problem,” he said.
“Rumors circulating on social media are so great and here we want to clarify that in the black box there were four flights that experienced problems with the airspeed indicator.”
At the meeting with family members, Tjahjono had said that information downloaded from the jet’s flight data recorder was consistent with reports that the plane’s speed and altitude were erratic after takeoff on its final flight. Searchers are still trying to locate the cockpit voice recorder.
Source: Fox News
Photo: AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim