Pilots of Lion Air plane that crashed may have been overwhelmed in seconds

As American and Indonesian investigators puzzle through clues of what went wrong, they are focusing not on a single lapse but on a cascade of troubling issues

The final moments of Lion Air Flight 610 as it hurtled soon after dawn from a calm Indonesian sky into the waters of the Java Sea would have been terrifying but swift.

The single-aisle Boeing aircraft, assembled in Washington State and delivered to Lion Air less than three months ago, appears to have plummeted nose-first into the water, its advanced jet [BS] engines racing the plane toward the waves at as much as 400 m.p.h. in less than a minute. The aircraft slammed into the sea with such force that some metal fittings aboard were reduced to powder, and the aircraft’s flight data recorder tore loose from its armored box, propelled into the muddy seabed.

As American and Indonesian investigators puzzle through clues of what went wrong, they are focusing not on a single lapse but on a cascade of troubling issues that ended with the deaths of all 189 people on board.|Lion Air plane

That is nearly always the case in plane crashes, in which disaster can rarely be pinned on one factor. While investigators have not yet concluded what caused Flight 610 to plunge into the sea, they know that in the days before the crash the plane had experienced repeated problems in some of the same systems that could have led the aircraft to go into a nose dive.

Questions about those problems and how they were handled constitute a sobering reminder of the trust we display each time we strap on seatbelts and take to the skies in a metal tube. On Oct. 29, on a morning with little wind, what appears to have been a perfect storm of problems — ranging from repeated data errors emanating from aircraft instruments to an airline with a distressing safety record — may have left the plane’s young pilot with an insurmountable challenge.| Business Standard