Lion Air crash victim's fiancée takes wedding pictures alone

The fiancée of a man killed in the Lion Air crash has gone ahead with a promise to take wedding photos in the event he could not attend their nuptials.

Intan Syari was due to marry Rio Nanda Pratama on 11 November but the doctor, who had been away for a conference, never made it.

He was one of 189 people on board flight JT610 when it crashed into the sea off Jakarta in Indonesia last month. Rescue workers halted their search for survivors at the weekend.

The couple, who are said to have met in middle school, had reportedly joked before he left for the trip that if he was delayed and could not attend their wedding, Ms Syari should take pictures of herself in her wedding dress and send them to him.

Posting on Instagram, the grieving bride said: “Although there is sadness that I can’t describe, I have to smile for you. I can’t be sad, I have to stay strong as you always told me to.”

Investigators now suspect that faulty sensor readings may have contributed to the Boeing 737’s crash on 29 October.

The jet’s airspeed indicator had malfunctioned on four previous flights, the craft’s black box revealed when fished out of the sea.

It is thought that a new feature on the 737 Max version of the aircraft, designed to prevent stalling, combined with faulty sensor readings to cause the crash.

Earlier this week investigators said more training was needed for pilots to be able to address such a situation after discovering that procedures for dealing with it were not contained in the jet’s manual.

Boeing did not tell airline pilots about features of a new flight-control system in its 737 Max that is reportedly a focus of the investigation, according to pilots who fly the jet in the US.

Pilots say they were not trained in new features of an anti-stall system in the aircraft that differ from previous models of the popular model.

The automated system is designed to help pilots avoid raising the plane’s nose too high, which can cause it to stall – losing the aerodynamic lift needed to keep flying. The system automatically pushes the nose of the plane down.

But if that nose-down command is triggered by faulty sensor readings, as is suspected in the Lion Air crash, pilots can struggle to control the plane, which can go into a dive and perhaps crash, according to a Boeing safety bulletin and safety regulators.

The bulletin included new details on how to stop a runaway series of events from leading to a crash, pilots say.

“It is something we did not have before in any of our training. It wasn’t in our books. American [Airlines] didn’t have it,” said Dennis Tajer, a 737 pilot and spokesperson for the pilots’ union at American. “Now I have to wonder, what else is there?”

Jon Weaks, a 737 captain and president of the pilots’ union at Southwest Airlines, said he could not recall a similar omission in a Boeing operating manual.

“I was not pleased. How could something like this happen? We want to be given the information to keep our pilots, our passengers and our families safe,” he said.

Mr Weaks said he is satisfied that “we have been given, finally, the correct information”.

The Max is the newest version of the twin-engine Boeing 737. More than 200 have been delivered to airlines worldwide, including American, Southwest and United.

Boeing chair and chief executive Dennis Muilenburg said on Tuesday that the Chicago-based company remains confident the Max is a safe aeroplane. He said Boeing did not withhold operating details from airlines and flight crews.

“We ensure that we provide all of the information that is needed to safely fly our aeroplanes,” Mr Muilenburg told Fox Business Network. He said Boeing bulletins to airlines and pilots “point them back to existing flight procedures” to handle the kind of sensor problem suspected in last month’s crash.

A Southwest spokesperson said the new automated manoeuvring system was not included in the operating manual for Max models. An American Airlines spokesperson said the carrier was unaware of some new automated functions in the Max but had not experienced nose-direction errors.

A United Airlines spokesperson said Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) do not believe additional pilot training is needed.

The FAA issued an emergency directive last week to airlines, telling them to update cockpit manuals to include instructions for how pilots can adjust flight controls under certain conditions.

“The FAA will take further action if findings from the accident investigation warrant,” the agency said in a statement on Tuesday.

John Cox, a former 737 pilot and now a safety consultant to airlines, said Boeing’s steps since the crash “have been exactly correct. They have increased pilot awareness, they have reminded them of the proper procedure to disable [the automatic nose-down action], which stops the problem.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that US and Indonesian investigators are increasingly focusing on the way that the plane’s automated control systems interact. They are also questioning whether the FAA and Boeing adequately analysed potential hazards if the systems malfunction and send faulty data to the plane’s computers, according to the newspaper.

Additional reporting by AP