AirAsia unusual fast climb could be factor of disaster

JAKARTA - The AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea last month had climbed at excessive speeds to an unusually high altitude before plunging and disappearing from radar, Indonesia’s top transportation official said Tuesday.

Radar data showed that the Airbus A320-200 was climbing at about 6,000 feet a minute before it crashed last month, killing all 162 people aboard, Ignasius Jonan, the minister of transportation, told a parliamentary commission.

“It is not normal to climb like that; it’s very rare for commercial planes, which normally climb just 1,000 to 2,000 feet per minute,” he told lawmakers, The Associated Press reported. “It can only be done by a fighter jet.”

The plane, Flight 8501, crashed on Dec. 28 less than an hour after taking off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya, bound for Singapore. As of Tuesday, forensic experts had identified 45 of 51 victims whose bodies, or body parts, had been recovered, officials said.

Dozens of relatives of those aboard the flight wait daily in a crisis center at the East Java provincial police headquarters in Surabaya, more than three weeks after the crash.

Shortly before air traffic controllers lost contact with Flight 8501, the plane’s pilots had requested permission to increase the altitude to 38,000 feet. The plane disappeared from radar around four minutes later, Indonesian transportation officials have said.

Indonesian Navy divers last week separately recovered the aircraft’s cockpit voice and data recorders amid debris and thick mud at a depth of around 100 feet in the Java Sea off the southern coast of Borneo Island.

The cause of the crash remains unclear, although weather has been cited as a probable factor.

Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, which is evaluating data from the plane’s black boxes, is expected to issue a preliminary report in the coming days.

Search vessels also located the plane’s fuselage last week, but surface waves as high as 16 feet and strong underwater currents have prevented Indonesian divers from reaching the wreckage to try to raise it using special inflatable balloons, said Jenny Wakana, an AirAsia spokeswoman in Surabaya.

Indonesian officials said last week that they suspected the bodies of more victims were most likely still inside the fuselage. That would mean that forensic identification operations at the crisis center in Surabaya, which have slowed in the last few weeks, could again increase after the fuselage is raised to the surface, Indonesian officials said.