Black box recordings indicate that warning alarms inside AirAsia Flight QZ8501 were "screaming" before the plane crashed into the Java Sea, an Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee investigator reported Wednesday.
The Airbus A320 disappeared about one hour into its flight to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia on December 28. Officials lost contact as the plane travelled between Belitung and Kalimantan, Indonesia with 162 people on board.
A crash investigator, under condition of anonymity, reported that several alarms can be heard going off "for some time," including one alarm indicating that the plane was stalling.
"The warning alarms, we can say, were screaming, while in the background they (the pilot and co-pilot) were busy trying to recover," the investigator told AFP. The source added that the pilots' voices were drowned out by the alarms.
The news came one day Indonesian Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan reported that Flight QZ8501 climbed at an unusually fast speed before stalling and crashing into the sea.
"In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal," Jonan told reporters.
Investigators said the disaster was reminiscent of Air France Flight 447 - an Airbus A330 that rapidly ascended before stalling and crashing into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009. The plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board. There were no survivors.
As with the lost AirAsia flight, the crash occurred in an area near the equator where north and south winds meet, and thunderstorms are common. Both planes experienced stormy weather during their flight.
"The similarities are pretty striking," Daniel Tsang, founder of Hong Kong-based consultancy Aspire Aviation, admitted.
AirAsia's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were recovered last week, and only 53 bodies have been recovered.
