Indonesian investigators meet victim's families before release of first Lion Air crash report

[JAKARTA] Indonesian investigators met with families of victims of last month's Lion Air crash, that killed all 189 people on board, hours before the public release of a preliminary report on Wednesday morning, an Indonesian official said.

Bloomberg, citing a source familiar with the report's contents, on Wednesday reported it said the pilots were fighting an anti-stall system on their Boeing Co 737 MAX as they attempted to diagnose multiple apparent failures.

That is in line with information recovered from the flight data recorder that was released to Indonesia's parliament by the country's transport safety committee last week.

Bloomberg, citing its source, said the report stopped short of concluding what caused the crash but provided new data about the jet's maintenance, the airline's instructions for pilots, Boeing's flight manuals, the local weather and efforts to recover the wreckage.

Indonesia's National Transport Safety Committee (KNKT) head Soerjanto Tjahjono on Wednesday declined to comment to Reuters before the public release of the report.

KNKT held the meetings with families in Jakarta and Pangkal Pinang, a tin mining town that was the planned destination of the doomed flight that crashed into the Java Sea, the Indonesian official said.

A family member of one of the victims told local media the information provided was "disappointing", with much of it already in the public domain.

The Lion Air crash is the world's first involving the 737 MAX jet, a fuel-efficient version of Boeing's workhorse narrowbody that was first introduced into service globally last year.

REUTERS