It has been almost two weeks since the black boxes for AirAsia Flight 8501 have been recovered and investigators are working hard to not only determine the cause of the crash, but also to piece together those last few minutes of the ill-fated flight. Flight 8501 plunged into the Java Sea on Dec. 28, killing all 162 on board. Bad weather is believed to have played a significant part in the crash but now it's also looking like a mechanical problem may have even complicated things more.
According to various reports, both computers on board the jet had been manually turned off and NBC News is saying that the pilot was out of his seat right before the plane lost control.
"People familiar with the matter said earlier this week that investigators were examining maintenance records of one of the automated systems, the Flight Augmentation Computer (FAC), and the way the pilots reacted to any outage. One person familiar with the matter said the captain had flown on the same plane with the intermittently faulty device days earlier. There was no independent confirmation of this. After trying to reset this device, pilots pulled a circuit-breaker to cut its power, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. People familiar with the matter said it was the Indonesian captain Iriyanto who took this step, rather than his less experienced French co-pilot Remy Plesel, who was flying the plane." said the report.
It seems that investigators are working on the notion that Iriyanto was out of his seat to manually shut down those computers and by the time he made it back the plane had already lost control in a way that he simply couldn't correct. As sad as this case is, at least they are managing to figure out what exactly went wrong, unlike in the case of Malaysia's Flight MH-370 which has been lost without a trace for nearly a year!
Do you think that it'll ultimately be determined that pilot error also brought down Flight 8501? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!
