No proof pilot crashed plane: SilkAir lawyers
No proof pilot crashed plane: SilkAir lawyers
SINGAPORE (Reuters): A Singapore court hearing into the 1997 crash of a SilkAir plane which killed 104 people resumed on Wednesday with the airline's lawyers maintaining there was no evidence to show that the pilot crashed the plane either intentionally or as a result of recklessness.
Families of six of the victims are suing the regional carrier for damages over the crash of Flight MI 185, which plunged into the Musi River on the Indonesian island of Sumatra en route from Jakarta to Singapore on Dec. 19, 1997.
The case was adjourned on July 18 so that both sides could prepare final written submissions.
Evidence produced by their witnesses during the 13-day trial in July suggested the pilot, Tsu Way Ming, had suicidal intentions and manually caused the jet to plunge suddenly from its last known flight altitude of 35,000 feet (10,606 meters) into a river.
But SilkAir's lawyer Lok Vi Ming, in his final submission in court, said the evidence fell short of establishing the pilot had committed the act.
"It is difficult to ascertain the exact positive case that the plaintiffs are asserting. They have failed to state precisely the factual scenario they are alleging," said Lok.
"As detailed in these submissions, the defendants say that the plaintiffs have not been able to establish or prove the objective bases upon which they rely on to draw their alleged inferences," he said.
Lok told Supreme Court Justice Tan Lee Meng that the plaintiffs had not been able to prove the pilot or co-pilot had intended to commit suicide or had been reckless with the Boeing 737-300 knowing that it would cause damage.
"The plaintiffs have not proved...any factual evidence that would entitle either of these contentions to be maintained," Lok said.
The plaintiffs' lawyer Michael Khoo painted a picture during an earlier hearing of an aircraft that was deliberately put into a nosedive by the pilot, Captain Tsu Way Ming.
Air traffic controllers did not receive a distress call and investigators found that the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder had stopped recording minutes before the plane went down -- prompting rumors of pilot suicide.
Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee said in its official crash report in December the highly fragmented wreckage "yielded no evidence to explain the cause of the accident".
The plaintiffs are seeking a higher level of compensation from SilkAir, a regional carrier belonging to Singapore Airlines.
Most families of the crash victims have already accepted compensation from SilkAir amounting to US$200,000 per victim which bars them from further legal action.