The plane, 40 minutes into the flight when contact was lost, was en route to Singapore to Surabaya, Indonesia.
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Results of the investigation into last year’s crash of an Indonesia AirAsia passenger jet have been released at a press conference which is still going on this morning.
JAKARTA, Indonesia-Indonesian crash investigators said an electrical problem and a resulting rudder-system error contributed to the crash of AirAsiaAIRASIA 3.68 % Flight 8501 on December 28, and that maintenance records showed the problem had been a recurring one in months before the flight.
The agency’s lead investigator Nurchayo Utomo said the soldering may have cracked due to extreme temperature changes as the aircraft moved between land and air.
When they received the fourth warning, the pilots tried to reset a computer system but also turned off the plane’s autopilot, sending it into a sharp roll from which they were unable to recover.
Experts say an outage of the so-called Flight Augmentation Computers would not directly cause the plane to crash, but without them, pilots would have to rely on manual flying skills that are often stretched during a sudden airborne emergency.
Flight QZ8501 went down in stormy weather on December 28, during what was supposed to be a short flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.
A total of 162 people died on the plane when it came down.
The investigators said bad weather conditions did not play a role in the accident.
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It is one of a string of aviation disasters in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy where rapid growth in air travel has overcrowded the country’s airports and raised safety concerns.
