American & Indonesian air crash investigators share a history:
Wall Street Journal
By ANDY PASZTOR
American and Indonesian air-crash investigators share a history of sometimes strained relations stretching back to the late 1990s, which U.S. officials say could impact the current AirAsia probe. That legacy also may partly explain why the two sides are still discussing potential U.S. participation in the probe of Flight 8501 nearly two weeks after the Airbus A320 with 162 people aboard dropped from radar while flying near storm cells en route to Singapore from Surabaya. In Washington, a spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board has said officials are waiting for an invitation to join the multinational inquiry, which already includes French industry and government experts. In recent years, the U.S. agency increasingly has been reluctant to commit significant resources, or send investigators to foreign accident scenes, before wreckage or black box recorders are recovered.
By contrast, officials in Jakarta have said the U.S. is welcome to participate, all it has to do is ask, and that they expect the NTSB eventually will join the probe. But they added that is likely to happen only after remnants of the plane, sitting in the silt at the bottom of the Java Sea, are brought to the surface. A spokesman for General Electric Co., which helped build the jetliner’s engines, earlier this week said the company fully anticipates participating in the inquiry alongside the NTSB. But he didn’t indicate a possible timetable. Former NTSB officials said prior disagreements between the two countries—sparked by two earlier fatal crashes of Indonesian carriers—appear to be complicating the current situation.
Some of these officials, who were involved in the disputes, remember how tension between the two camps initially erupted. In the wake of the SilkAir flight that went down in a muddy Indonesian river delta in 1997, killing all 104 people on board, U.S. and Indonesian experts joined forces to dissect causes of the tragedy. But they had a falling out over the findings of the final report. In the end, Indonesian experts concluded there was no way to conclusively determine why certain flight-control panels on the tail were put into a dive configuration, or why both flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders stopped operating before the fatal dive. NTSB experts, however, felt the physical evidence and other data pointed to pilot suicide. By 2000, the NTSB’s chairman publicly indicated that no airplane-related failures could explain what occurred, and the only plausible explanation was intentional pilot action.
About 10 years later, there was similar friction after a jet operated by Adam Air, a now-defunct low-cost carrier, went down during a domestic flight, killing 102 people. Indonesian authorities, who said they needed various forms of outside help, persisted in asking the U.S. to foot the bill to try to bring the wreckage to the surface from some 6,000 feet under water. Mark Rosenker, who was NTSB chairman at the time, recalls that an Indonesian delegation came to Washington—and went to visit United Nations air-safety officials in Montreal—as part of a campaign to press for U.S. funding. But safety board officials kept saying no. “It became a point of principle,” Mr. Rosenker said this week, because the U.S. was convinced international law and precedent required Indonesia to underwrite retrieval costs. Eventually, the airline paid for the search to retrieve the recorders.
When it comes to AirAsia, Indonesian officials say data from the A320’s black-box recorders, once the devices are recovered, will be downloaded at a government laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. Government investigators from France, the country that certified the aircraft and where it was assembled, are expected to participate. Amid rough seas and poor visibility underwater in the search area southwest of the island of Borneo, Indonesia has accepted the help of military assets from many foreign nations, including the U.S., China, Malaysia, Australia and Russia.
Australia, which took the lead in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 last year, hasn’t taken such a prominent role this time. But Singapore, another commercial-aviation powerhouse that seeks to become the center of air-safety advocacy in the Pacific region, has provided some technical advice and search equipment. U.S. experts also have been involved in other recent Indonesian crash investigations. A number of NTSB experts traveled to Indonesia to participate in the probe of a Lion Air jet that crashed into the water short of a runway last April while trying to land in stormy weather in Bali. There were no fatalities, but the plane broke into pieces.