Jakarta - Pilot error was among the causes for the crash of a commercial jetliner in the waters off eastern Indonesia last year that killed all 102 people aboard, the country's airliner safety board said Tuesday. The National Transportation Safety Committee said in its final report that a faulty navigation device was among the factors leading to the January 1, 2007 crash of the Boeing 737 jetliner.
Adam Air Flight KI-574 was carrying 96 passengers and a crew of six when it disappeared during a scheduled flight from Surabaya, the capital of East Java province, to Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi province.
"The accident resulted from a combination of factors, including the failure of the pilots to adequately monitor the flight instruments, particularly during the final two minutes of the flight," the committee said.
"Preoccupation with a malfunction of the Inertial Reference System (IRS) diverted both pilots' attention from the flight instruments, and allowed the increasing descent and bank angle to go unnoticed," it said.
"The pilots did not detect and appropriately arrest the descent soon enough to prevent loss control," it said.
Parts of the wreckage were not found until nine days after it disappeared from radar screens. The plane's flight recorders were eventually recovered by a US-hired underwater salvage team at a depth of 2,000 metres.
The Adam Air crash was the first of two airline disasters in Indonesia last year.
In March of last year, a jetliner belonging to the flag carrier Garuda Indonesia slammed into an airport runway in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, careening into rice paddies and bursting into flames. Twenty-one people including five Australians, were killed.
In the wake of the accidents, the country's airline industry was sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union for not meeting international safety standards, especially in its growing budget airline market.
Indonesian director-general of air transport last week banned the beleaguered Adam Air from flying due to its poor safety record.
The airline will remain grounded until it is evaluated again in three months. If no improvements were found, the airline would lose its air operator certificate - a separate safety certification - for good, something that would move the company to permanent closure.
