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.