Originally Posted by
BG47
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.
It's concerning if the Indonesian authorities have control of the recovered data, and they have a history of denying an issue if it is something they feel embarrassed about (like a suicide).