Fair and Balanced reporting

JAKARTA - MOMENTS before their Adam Air Boeing 737 aircraft crashed into the sea, killing all 102 people on board, the two pilots were frantic.
'This is really bad. It is starting to fly like a bamboo ship. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up!' screamed one.

The other yelled: 'Crazy, this is crazy.'

Their last recorded words, captured by the cockpit voice recorder, were released yesterday by investigators who blamed errors by the two pilots and a faulty navigation system for the crash on New Year's Day last year.

Investigators found that the pilots had accidentally disconnected the autopilot system while trying to fix a problem in the navigation instruments.

'Without the autopilot, the plane went out of control, listing to the right and pitching down,' investigator Santoso Sayogo told a press conference yesterday.

The plane was flying from Java to an airport in the east of Indonesia when it spiralled from the sky at a height of 10,000m. It took around two minutes to hit the sea, investigators said.

Several days passed before fishermen and navy boats located floating wreckage off the island of Sulawesi. Both flight data recorders were eventually found on the sea bed. The plane's mostly intact fuselage remains under water.

No bodies were recovered.

Transport Minister Jusman Syafei Djamal said Adam Air had registered 154 defects in the Boeing 737-400's navigation system in the three months before the crash, showing that the plane was poorly maintained.

Indonesia's transport safety chief Tatang Kurniadi said: 'The accident happened because of a combination of several factors, including the failure of both pilots to intensively monitor flight instruments, especially in the last two minutes of the flight.'

The pilots had reported the navigation system problem but sounded unconcerned, even joking just 20 minutes before the plane went down.

Later, as they tried to fix the problem, the autopilot disengaged, causing the plane to bank to the right.

The pilots were apparently unaware that they were now flying the plane and ignored 'a number of initial alerts, warnings and changes to displays' indicating the jetliner's increasingly critical situation, the National Transportation Safety Committee report said.

They were so preoccupied with the repair work they were attempting that they did not act to stop the plane's descent and prevent it from going out of control.

Well, there’s that article. Is there anything wrong with the article? I don’t think so. But look at the way that the Straits Times headlined it. “Pilots were joking and unconcerned just before crash”. This is a blatant foul which makes the pilots look really bad. But is this true?

We know that the pilots made a serious mistake in disconnecting the autopilot while trying to repair the navigation system. But that is not due to negligence. Nobody who makes a mistake in a split second should be blamed too much. If they are joking and laughing well their job is a stressful one and you can’t expect anybody to be serious all the time. Everybody knows that Indonesians like to laugh and joke.

It’s clear that the airline is to be blamed for faulty maintenance. Or you could even attribute it to the proliferation of all these budget airlines proclaimed not long ago to be the great and wonderful thing of the future. Airplanes so wonderful they don’t even need to be maintained. Governments who think that when they hands off and not regulate commercial air transport industry they are not fucking around with peoples’ lives.

Most convenient thing to do in this case is to let the dead assume all the blame. Meanwhile I feel sorry for the pilots who not only have to screw around with shitty equipment and endanger all their lives but risk these reporters slanting stories against them and letting their families face the wrath of the victims’ families.