Indonesian plane crash ‘due to throttle repair failure and pilot errors’

Lead investigator Nurcahyo Utomo said at a news conference that the pilots’ last conversation with air traffic control was about four minutes after take-off, when they responded to an instruction to go up to 13,000ft.

National Transportation Safety Committee investigator Nurcahyo Utomo holds a model of a plane during a press conference in Jakarta (Tatan Syuflana/AP)

Indonesian investigators have concluded that a nearly decade-long failure to properly repair an automatic throttle, pilots’ overreliance on the plane’s automation system and inadequate training contributed to a Boeing 737-500 crash that killed 62 people.

National Transportation Safety Committee investigators said in their final report that the Sriwijaya Air jet’s maintenance record showed the problem with the automatic throttle had been reported by pilots 65 times since 2013 and was still unsolved when the 26-year-old plane plunged into the Java Sea after taking off from Jakarta on January 9 2021.