Report into AirAsia crash blames 'icing' of plane's engines
The first official Indonesian report on the crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 says the accident was caused by “icing” which damaged the plane’s engines – a finding that experts immediately said was doubtful.
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In a seemingly premature attempt to explain the crash, Indonesia’s meteorological agency released a 14-page report which blamed the accident on “worrying” weather conditions which froze the Airbus A320’s machinery.
“Based on data that is provided on the last location of the plane, the weather is the cause of the accident,” said the report by Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency.
“The most probable weather phenomenon that caused the plane engines to be damaged is icing. This is only one analysis based on the meteorological data and not the final cause of the incident.”
But the findings were called into question by aviation analysts, who said modern commercial aircrafts have resilient anti-icing devices.
Péter Marosszéky, an aviation expert at Australia’s University of New South Wales, said Airbus had previously had problems with icing but these had all been fixed.
“Icing is an unlikely cause of damage or a stall because these modern aircraft can resist the effect of icing,” he told The Telegraph.
“These planes have anti-icing which precludes icing on the wing surface or on the critical parts of the engine. Unless those systems were not working, it would be pretty unlikely that icing was a factor.”
More than a week since the plane crashed during a flight from the city of Surabaya for Singapore, search crews are still battling heavy weather as they try to recover the bodies of passengers and locate the plane. So far, the corpses of 34 of the 162 people on board have been found.
Five large objects have now also been located in a confined section of the Java Sea and are believed to be the plane’s tail and wings. The largest object was 59 feet by 18 feet, found at a depth of 98 feet.
Bambang Soelistyo, the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, said the latest object picked up by sonar imaging was 33 feet long.
The finding that “icing” damaged the plane’s engines emerged as the Indonesian government has increasingly sought to blame AirAsia for breaching regulations in the lead-up to the crash.
Ignasius Jonan, Indonesia’s transport minister, has accused the low-cost airline of failing to use official weather reports in pre-flight briefings to the flight’s pilots. AirAsia denied the allegations, saying it received briefings four times a day from the meteorological agency and these were immediately passed on to pilots.
Mr Jonan has also accused AirAsia of operating the doomed flight without permission to fly from Surabaya to Singapore on Sundays. The airline has now been banned from operating any flights on that route.
AirAsia has denied the flight was illegal, while Singapore’s aviation authority has confirmed that the airline had permission to operate daily flights there.
But there are suggestions that the airline may somehow have received an improper permit in Indonesia, a nation whose aviation authorities have been plagued by mismanagement, poor administration and allegations of corruption.
Djoko Murjatmodjo, the acting head of air transport in Indonesia’s transportation ministry, told The Jakarta Post: “We know [someone] must have given the permit. We’re looking into the who and why.” Meanwhile, authorities are continuing with the grim and painstaking task of finding and identifying the bodies. The head of Indonesia’s disaster victims identification unit, Anton Castilani, said it could take up to two weeks to identify all the passengers after their bodies are recovered.
Credit: The Telegraph
