Indonesian investigators said on Thursday the cockpit voice recorder from a crashed Lion Air Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 jet showed pilots were searching for the right checklist in their handbooks and were experiencing airspeed and altitude issues.
The investigators said they have 90 per cent of the data needed to release a final report on the October crash that killed 189 people, which is expected in August.
Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator at Indonesia’s national transportation committee (KNKT), said the recording showed there was “panic” in the cockpit in the last 20 seconds of the flight. “At the end of the flight it seemed the pilot felt he could no longer recover the flight, then the panic emerged,” he said while declining to say which of the two pilots panicked.
