Indonesia To Release AirAsia Crash Report

Indonesia will publish the results of its investigation into last year's crash of an Indonesia AirAsia passenger jet on Tuesday, the first official explanation to the families of the 162 people killed in the disaster.

The Airbus A320 crashed into the Java Sea on December 28 last year, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city, Surabaya to Singapore.

It is one of a string of aviation disasters in Southeast Asia's biggest economy where rapid growth in air travel has overcrowded the country's airports and raised safety concerns.

The report is expected to offer the first official explanation of why flight QZ8501 disappeared from radar, after the Indonesian Transportation Safety Committee declined to publish its preliminary report.

Among the facts released so far, the French first officer was at the controls just before the accident and a stall warning sounded in the cockpit, indicating that the jet had lost lift.

The report is expected to focus in particular on whether any of the plane's systems were faulty and how pilots responded.

According to reports, one of the pilots attempted to shut power off to the intermittently faulty computer by pulling circuit-breakers, a procedure not usually allowed in flight.

Reuters news agency reported that the captain appeared to have left his seat in order to do so, but Indonesian investigators said in February they had not found evidence for this or that power was deliberately shut off.

Experts say an outage of the so-called Flight Augmentation Computers would not directly cause the plane to crash, but without them pilots would have to rely on manual flying skills that are often stretched during a sudden airborne emergency.

The report is not designed to attribute blame but to make recommendations to avoid future accidents.

AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes has vowed to support the investigation and said in August the group had already ordered a review of its systems following the crash.