Investigators fail to find cause of 1997 SilkAir crash
Investigators fail to find cause of 1997 SilkAir crash
SINGAPORE (AFP): The investigation into the 1997 crash of a SilkAir jet has been unable to find out why it plunged into a river in South Sumatra, with the loss of 104 lives, but said deliberate pilot action was a "plausible hypothesis."
Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC), in a statement released in Singapore on Thursday said there was a lack of concrete evidence to support the theory that a distressed pilot deliberately caused the tragedy.
The crash of the Boeing 737, the worst in Singapore civil aviation history, yielded little useful data, making the investigation "an almost impossible task," said Oetarjo Diran, chairman of the committee.
He said that "due to the highly fragmented wreckage, and the nearly total lack of useful data, information, findings and evidence, the investigation cannot explain how or why the accident happened."
Singapore police, who had opened a suicide-murder investigation, said they had closed their inquiry after finding no evidence of suicidal tendencies among the crew.
In an interim report last year, Indonesian investigators said that the flight's Singaporean pilot Tsu Way Ming was facing financial problems and had been disciplined three times in the months prior to the crash.
In his report released Thursday, Diran said more than 30,000 man-hours were spent investigating the SilkAir flight MI185 crash, aided by experts from the United States, Singapore and Australia.
"The U.S. has said that the accident can be explained by intentional pilot action. This was a possibility that the investigation team explored extensively. However, due to the lack of concrete evidence, this could not be proven conclusively," Diran said.
The crash investigation report found that both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder inexplicably stopped just prior to the aircraft plunging from 35,000 feet on a scheduled flight from Jakarta to Singapore in December 1997.
The horizontal stabilizer trim was in the position for an aircraft to be nose-down, but there was no evidence as to how it came to be in that position.
Diran said there was also no evidence of weather, mechanical or maintenance problems as possible causes of the tragedy.
Although the U.S. theory of pilot action was a "plausible hypothesis, the objective of this investigation has to go beyond hypothesizing to establish conclusions based on concrete evidence and proof," he said.
Singapore police said they were called into the investigation last August when the nose-down position of the horizontal stabilizer trim did not match its last known setting, raising the possibility of "manual input."
In a statement issued after Diran's report was released, police said they found "no evidence that the pilot, co-pilot or any crew member had suicidal tendencies or a motive to deliberately cause the crash."
The crew were all financially solvent at the time of the accident, police said.
In a brief statement, SilkAir said it accepted the findings but expressed regret that the inquiry proved inconclusive.
"We wanted to know the cause as much as anybody else, but regrettably there are no definite answers," the regional airline said in a statement.
The Singapore government also accepted the findings, but added: "It is regrettable that despite three years of painstaking and exhaustive work" the cause of the accident was not established.
SilkAir is a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines Ltd. (SIA). The findings were issued as Taiwanese investigators continued to look into the Oct. 31 crash of an SIA 747-400 aircraft which killed 83 people at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport.