A 2014 AirAsia plane crash resulted from a pilot resetting a circuit breaker connected to the aircraft's computer system, according to Indonesian investigators who announced their findings on Tuesday. "Someone" in the cockpit pulled out and reinserted the circuit breaker in an apparent attempt to reset the flight augmentation computer, which regulated the plane's rudder functions. The attempt caused a series of electronic failures, including disengaging autopilot and the auto-thrust of the plane, and left the pilots without control of the aircraft, The New York Times reports. Investigators discovered the cause by analyzing the plane's recovered flight data.
Flight 8501 crashed on December 28, 2014, en route to Singapore, less than an hour after taking off from Surabaya, Indonesia. The pilots were alerted by four separate alarms in the cockpit that a system controlling the airplane's rudder movement had failed. Removing and reinserting the circuit breaker is thought to have been an attempt to fix the problem. All 162 people onboard died in the crash.
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