Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182, with 62 passengers and crew on Boeing B-737-500 aircraft, plunged into the Java Sea on Jan. 9 last year after it departed Jakarta bound for Pontianak in West Kalimantan, killing all on board.

At a hearing on Thursday at the House of Representatives’ Commission V, which oversees infrastructure and transportation, acting Director General of Civil Aviation Nur Isnin Istiartono said that 27 out of 62 families of victims of the Sriwijaya Air crash have yet to receive compensation.

Among 27 families, two families were close to receiving settlements and eight families were stalled in the process due to incomplete documents. The remaining 17 families refused to follow through with the process amid an ongoing lawsuit against the American-based aircraft company Boeing.

According to a 2011 Transportation Ministry regulation, an air-passenger carrier must give Rp 1.25 billion (US$79,503) for the family of each passenger killed in a flight accident.

Sriwijaya promised that each identified victim’s family is set to receive compensation of Rp 1.25 billion, with an additional Rp 250 million to help families hold funerals.

Commission V member Nurhadi of the NasDem Party (Nasdem) suspected that some families have yet to receive compensation because they refused to sign an agreement to not pursue legal action against the airline company. 

“Why did the families refuse? Was it because they were told to sign certain documents, such as an agreement not to take legal action?” Nurhadi said.

Commission chairman Lazarus of the Democratic Party (Democrats) warned Nur Isnin to seriously oversee the compensation disbursement. 

“Whether they would file a lawsuit or not is none of our business; it's people's legal rights, not insurance [company’s] or Sriwijaya's domain. If there is a requirement [to agree on] not pursuing a lawsuit, this needs serious attention,” he said.

In response, Sriwijaya Airline director Anthony Raimond Tampubolon reiterated his commitment to fulfill the rights of the families according to existing regulations, without any such stipulation.

"We do not have any agreement with the families regarding the requirements to receive compensation and we do not limit the right of the victim's family to file claims,” Anthony told the session.

A member of the victim's families, however, said otherwise. 

Ernawati, whose husband and brother-in-law were killed in the crash, said her family signed a letter of agreement to not file a lawsuit in order to receive compensation.

"Yes, there is a letter of agreement not to sue them," Ernawati told The Jakarta Post. 

Lazarus said if Sriwijaya requires the letter of agreement to the victim's family, House Commission V will summon them.

Mechanical problems

Also in the hearing, investigators reported that the deadly crash was due to mechanical problems, the pilot's complacency and confirmation bias as factors behind the tragedy.

The plane went into a steep dive from an altitude of 10,900 feet to 250 ft in less than one minute during the crash.

Nurcahyo Utomo, an official with the National Police and the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT), said that after examining the Electronic Attitude Direction Indicator (EADI), the team concluded that the pilot did not realize that the aircraft has changed its direction as he believed shown in the autopilot system. 

The pilot's voice, however, was not recorded in the cockpit voice recorder.

"We suspect the pilot was not wearing the headset so we could not analyze the pilot and copilot's cooperation," said the KNKT’s head of the Aviation Safety Investigation Committee.

A mechanical problem was found on the auto-throttle system that automatically controlled the engine power of the B-737-500 aircraft.

The auto-throttle system failed to balance the engine power, where the right engine was more powerful than the left so the aircraft tilted. However, the "yoke" or steering lever in the cockpit tilts to the right when the airplane has actually turned left.

The pilot realized that there was a problem only after the bank angle warning appeared as the plane's tilt angle was more than 35 degrees.

Based on the flight data-recorder examination, in the first four seconds the pilot tried to correct the situation by turning the plane to the left, because he assumed the aircraft was turning to the right according to the yoke's position when in fact the aircraft was turning left.

"The pilot's [wrong] assumption and the lack of monitoring resulted in incorrect recovery efforts," Nurcahyo said.

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