Divers scoured the Java Sea on Tuesday looking for clues that could explain why a brand new airliner fell out of the sky just moments after takeoff, killing all 189 people on board.
The New York Times reports that before Lion Air Flight 610 lost contact on Monday, the plane displayed erratic changes in its speed, altitude and direction, causing experts to speculate that a problem with the aircraft’s instruments used to calculate airspeed and altitude may have contributed to the crash.
Those indicators, or pitot tubes, have been implicated in previous aviation disasters, but experts said that determining the cause of the crash would ultimately require the recovery of the plane’s flight data recorders, the so-called black boxes.
Flight 610 departed Jakarta, Indonesia, on Monday at 6:20 a.m.
Soon after takeoff the plane reached an altitude of 2,100 feet before falling precipitously to around 1,475 feet, according to satellite data transmitted from the airplane and collated by the aviation website Flightradar24.
Moments later, the plane climbed to altitudes varying between 4,500 and 5,350 feet. The data then shows a steep decline, until contact was lost at 6:32 a.m.
In a normal flight, the lines in the chart above representing speed and altitude would level off into a smooth plateau, but on Monday’s flight they fluctuate erratically.
“The erratic flight path makes us suspect a problem with the pitot-static system,” Gerry Soejatman, an Indonesian aviation expert, told The New York Times.
