The pilots' response towards a technical malfunction is what caused the crash of Air Asia Flight QZ8501, investigators said on Tuesday. The plane was en route to Singapore from Surabaya, an Indonesian city, on Dec. 28 last year when it crashed into the Java Sea, killing all the passengers onboard - 162 in total, according to CNN.
A cracked solder joint on the plane's control computer made it malfunction. According to the aircraft maintenance records, it had already malfunctioned 23 times in the year before the crash and the time period between each of those malfunctions grew shorter in three months prior to the crash.
"Subsequent flight crew action resulted in inability to control the aircraft...causing the aircraft to depart from the normal flight envelope and enter a prolonged stall condition that was beyond the capability of the flight crew to recover," Indonesia's National Transport Safety Committee said in a report.
During its last flight, the problem had occurred four times. The first three times, the flight crew responded according to standard procedure, said investigators. However, during the fourth time, the flight data-recorder had indicated actions that were similar to circuit breakers being reset, which led the autopilot to disengage, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As a result, the pilots could not control the airplane and it subsequently crashed. Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of Indonesia's National Safety Committee, said in a news briefing that "the circuit breaker was pulled out and then pushed in again. It caused some electrical distraction."
Although the investigators do not have evidence to prove their theory about how the airplane crashed, they strongly speculate that one of the pilots in the cockpit had reset the computer's circuit breaker, in a report made by The New York Times.
The Airbus A320-200 crashed less than an hour after taking off from Surabaya.