Lion Air jet should have been grounded before fatal flight : Officials
Jakarta, Nov 28 : A Lion Air jet that crashed last month should have been grounded over a recurrent technical problem and never permitted to make the fatal flight, Indonesian authorities said Wednesday in a report that took aim at the carrier's poor safety culture.
The Boeing 737 MAX vanished from radar about 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta on October 29, slamming into the Java Sea moments after it had asked to return to the capital.
The preliminary crash report from Indonesia's transport safety agency did not pinpoint a definitive cause of the accident, which killed all 189 people on board, including an Indian pilot, with a final report not likely to be filed until next year.
But investigators said that Lion Air kept putting the plane back into service despite repeatedly failing to fix a problem with the airspeed indicator in the days leading up to the fatal flight.
Its second last flight was from Denpasar in Bali to Jakarta.
"During (that) flight, the plane was experiencing a technical problem but the pilot decided to continue," Nurcahyo Utomo, aviation head at the National Transport Safety Committee, told reporters.
"The plane was no longer airworthy and it should not have kept" flying, he added.
The findings will heighten concerns there were problems with key systems in one of the world's newest and most advanced commercial passenger planes.
Investigators have previously said the doomed aircraft had problems with its airspeed indicator and angle of attack (AOA) sensors, prompting Boeing to issue a special bulletin telling operators what to do when they face the same situation.
The report confirmed that initial finding, saying the plane's data recorder detected an issue with the AoA.
It also said the plane's "stick shaker" -- the steering-wheel like handles in front of the pilots that vibrates to warn of a system malfunction -- was "activated and continued for most of the fight."
An AOA sensor provides data about the angle at which air is passing over the wings and tells pilots how much lift a plane is getting. The information can be critical in preventing an aircraft from stalling.
The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee has retrieved one of the plane's black boxes -- the flight data recorder -- but is yet to locate the cockpit voice recorder.
Black box data showed the plane also had an airspeed indicator issue on multiple earlier flights, investigators said.
Lion must take steps "to improve the safety culture" and ensure "all the operation documents are properly filled and documented", the transport agency said.
Despite a dubious safety record and an avalanche of complaints over shoddy service, the budget carrier's parent Lion Air Group, which also operates Batik Air and Wings Air, has captured half the domestic market in less than 20 years of operation to become Southeast Asia's biggest airline.
Indonesia's aviation safety record has improved since its airlines, including national carrier Garuda, were subject to years-long bans from US and European airspace for safety violations, although the country has still recorded 40 fatal accidents over the past 15 years.
The report stopped short of making any recommendations to Boeing but the US planemaker has come under fire for possible glitches on the 737 MAX -- which entered service just last year.
The APA, a US airline pilots union, said that carriers and pilots had not been informed by Boeing of certain changes in the aircraft control system installed on the new MAX variants of the 737.
"I am really surprised if Boeing has not shared all the flight performance parameters with pilots, unions, and training organisations," University of Leeds aviation expert Stephen Wright told AFP before the report was released, adding that "a deliberate omission would have serious legal ramifications" Several relatives of the crash victims have already filed lawsuits against Boeing, including the family of a young doctor who was to have married his high school sweetheart this month.
Lion Air Flight JT610 plunged into the sea less than half an hour after taking off on a routine flight to Pangkal Pinang city.
Authorities have called off the grim task of identifying victims of the crash, with 125 passengers officially recognised after testing on human remains that filled some 200 body bags.
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'Low-quality' catheters supplied to West Bengal govt hospitals at high price, probe ordered
Kolkata (PTI): The West Bengal health department has launched a probe into the supplies of allegedly low-quality and locally made catheters at a high price to several government hospitals, posing a risk to the lives of patients undergoing treatment in these facilities, officials said.
Such central venous catheters (CVCs) were allegedly supplied to at least five medical colleges and hospitals in the state, defying allocation of international standard-compliant CVCs, they said.
The distribution company, which has been accused of supplying these catheters to government hospitals, admitted to the fault but placed the blame on its employees.
"We started checking stocks some time back and found these locally made CVCs in my hospital store. These catheters are of low quality as compared to those allocated by the state. We have informed the state health department," a senior official of the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital told PTI.
Low-quality catheters were also found in the stores of other hospitals, which indicates "possible involvement of insiders in the scam", a health department official said.
The low-quality CVCs were supplied by a distributor in the Hatibagan area in the northern part of Kolkata for the last three to four months, he said.
"Such kinds of local CVCs are priced around Rs 1,500 but the distributor took Rs 4,177 for each device," the official said.
A CVC is a thin and flexible tube that is inserted into a vein to allow for the administration of fluids, blood, and other treatment. It's also clinically called a central line catheter.
"An initial probe revealed that the distribution company Prakash Surgical had supplied the low-quality and locally manufactured catheters to several government hospitals instead of the CVCs of the government-designated international company.
"All the units will be tested and a proper investigation is on to find out who benefited from these supplies," the health department official said.
The distribution company blamed its employees for the supply of inferior quality catheters.
"I was sick for a few months. Some employees of the organisation made this mistake. We are taking back all those units that have gone to the hospitals. It's all about misunderstanding," an official of the distribution company told PTI.
According to another state health department official, a complaint was lodged with the police in this connection.
Asked about how many patients were affected by the usage of such low-quality CVCs, the official said, "The probe would also try to find that out".
According to sources in the health department, some of the staff of the hospitals' equipment receiving departments and some local officials of international organisations might be involved in the alleged irregularities.
