Indonesia plane crash: Families of victims file lawsuit against Boeing

Families who lost relatives in Indonesia’s Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 flight plane crash on January 30 sued Boeing for operating a ‘defective and a dangerous aircraft’. At least three Indonesian families of the victims killed onboard SJ-182 air carrier, filed a lawsuit against the Chicago-based aerospace firm with the Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois on January 25, United States' Wisner Law Firm said in a release. Family members looking for settlement claimed in the lawsuit that the 737-500 plane models have a "fatal malfunction" that caused the flight to "auto-dive" and plunge into the Java Sea bed, off the Indonesian coast, north of Jakarta just minutes after the takeoff. The flight, bound for Jakarta to Pontianak, vanished from the radar following a 2:36 pm departure from Soekarno-Hatta Airport. 

The lawsuit alleged, that the retarded autothrottle system of the Boeing 737-500 aircraft that controls engine power, caused the Sriwijaya Air crash on January 9 that killed all 62 passengers, including the pilots and the aviation staff. Indonesia’s air accident investigator agency National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT), however, is yet to determine the cause of the crash in the ongoing probe. In a statement to local news agencies, the KNKT alleged that it was trying to locate the CVR of the aircraft to hear the pilots’ conversation about the glitch. It said, that a report of malfunction on the autothrottle was found logged with a technician in the maintenance log. Plane’s autothrottle, meanwhile, can be manually operated. The air disasters committee is expected to release a preliminary early February, according to Wisner’s release, the firm that helped settlements for families from October 2018 Lion Air crash. 

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[Rescuers recover a piece of airplane part from Lion Air flight 610 that crashed into the sea during a rescue operation in the waters of Tanjung Karawang, Indonesia.Credit: AP]

Boeing's Safety Overhaul

Boeing remained in the centre of controversies after its aircraft fleet MAX, was suspected fitted with faulty parts. The snag was identified by US-based peak aviation watchdog that announced that the Boeing 300 MAXs and 737 models had faulty wing slats. Federal Aviation Administration identified 20 737 MAXs with faulty slats and 159 planes installed with such parts. Months after the investigation, a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash grounded Boeing’s best selling MAX jetliners worldwide. The crash was preceded by Lion Air crash in Indonesia. The combines death toll shot to 346. Safety overhaul in Boeing’s plane, according to the suit filed, was caused due to the faulty part, the families alleged. The lawsuit cited the events when pilots for Lion Aircraft tussled with plane’s automatic safety system that nosedived the aircraft automatically a few minutes into the flight.  

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(Image Credit: AP)