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Confusion and a Prayer – The final moments of the LionAir crash audio released

cde.news desk · 2 min read
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epa07212793 (FILE) - A picture made available on 18 March 2013 shows a Lion Air Boeing 737 passenger airplane on the tarmac at Soekarno Hatta international airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, 23 June 2012 (reissued 06 December 2018). Edward Sirait, CEO of Indonesian Lion Air on 06 December 2018 said the company may consider a cancellation of orders for the Boeing 737 Max plane after a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max airplane on 29 October 2018 crashed soon after take-off from Jakarta to Bali, killing all 189 people on board the plane. EPA-EFE/MAST IRHAM

As the seconds ticked by on the doomed Indonesian flight, the pilot handed the controls to his co-pilot and flipped through the pages of a technical manual, trying to figure out what was happening.

Then, as the nose of Lion Air Flight 610 repeatedly bucked downward, Harvino, the co-pilot, began to pray.

New York Times reports that the supplication was caught on the final seconds of audio in the cockpit voice recorder.

“God is great,” Mr. Harvino, an experienced Indonesian aviator, said, then recited a verse asking God to grant a miracle. But there was no miracle on Oct. 29, when the brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8 dived into the Java Sea in Indonesia, amid good weather, after 12 minutes in the air.

“With the crash of a second nearly brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8 earlier this month, when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 slammed into the ground near the capital, Addis Ababa, there has been a renewed focus on the investigation into what caused Flight 610 to crash in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.

Indonesian transportation officials say they do not expect to publish a final report on the accident until July or August at the earliest. A preliminary report, based on the contents of the flight data recorder — one of the two so-called black boxes that give investigators clues to what happened in aviation accidents — was released in November.

The cockpit voice recorder was not found until after the preliminary report was released, so the conversations between Bhavye Suneja, an Indian national who was piloting the plane, and Mr. Harvino were not included in the initial investigative account.”

Via NYT

Topics AirplaneAviationBoeing 737 MaxcrashLion Air