Investigators: AirAsia First Officer At Controls Before Crash

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The first officer of the AirAsia jet that crashed into Java Sea in December was at the controls before the aircraft stalled into the ocean, investigators said Thursday. The Airbus A320 disappeared from radar en route to Singapore, killing all 162 people on board. Meanwhile, CNN reported this week that as the flight and data recorders, retrieved earlier this month, are analyzed, efforts to fully recover the wreckage have failed.

“The second-in-command, popularly known as the co-pilot, who usually sits to the right of the cockpit, at the time, he was flying the plane,” National Transport Safety Committee (NTSC) investigator Mardjono Siswosuwarno said in Thursday’s Reuters report, referring to the French first officer Remi Plesel.”The captain, sitting to the left, was the pilot monitoring,” he said.Data from the flight data recorder gave investigators a “pretty clear picture” of what happened in the last moments before the crash, Siswosuwarno said in the Reuters report.The captain, an Indonesian air force veteran with about 20,000 hours, was believed to have taken the controls when the Airbus started to ascend and then descend, the Reuters report said.

CNN reported that the Indonesian military will halt efforts for a complete recovery of the Airbus.Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, Basarnas, will continue efforts to recover bodies, the head of the agency, Bambang Soelistyo, said in CNN’s report.Seventy bodies have been recovered, leaving 92 still unaccounted for.Divers were unable to lift part of the fuselage when connecting lines broke.

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