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BANGKOK: Aviation officials probing Thailand's worst aviation disaster in nearly a decade were Wednesday studying whether human error, foul weather or airport malfunctions were to blame for the deadly crash.
Vutichai Singhamany, a safety director at the Department of Civil Aviation, told AFP that the pilot had put the landing gear down on his approach to Phuket airport in a heavy storm, but retracted it and tried in vain to pull up.
"The wheels did not touch the runway," Vutichai told AFP. "Then the plane tried to pull up and the accident happened."
The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 plane operated by budget carrier One-Two-Go slammed onto the runway Sunday in driving rain before veering off onto an embankment and breaking up in flames, killing 89 of the 130 people on board.
Vutichai confirmed that three of six systems designed to detect a dangerous weather phenomenon known as wind shear were not working when the passenger jet crashed, but said that may not have caused the tragedy.
"Aircraft are equipped with their own warning systems, which do not depend on the ground ones," he told AFP.
Wind shear is a sudden change in wind direction that can throw a plane off course but then disappear just as quickly, leaving pilots struggling to keep the jet under control.
Indonesian pilot Arief Mulyadi, who was among the dead, received warnings from both another plane and air traffic control of wind shear, officials have said, but tried to land anyway.
The Nation newspaper reported Wednesday that Mulyadi's final communication to the air traffic control tower was "landing", after controllers asked what his intentions were.
But his son offered a different account of events, telling Indonesian media on Tuesday that Phuket authorities had told him his father wanted to turn back to Bangkok but the control tower had instructed him to land.
Smith Thammararoj, head of Thailand's National Disaster Warning Centre, rejected that claim.
"The captain is absolutely the only person to make the decision -- nobody can tell him whether to land or not to land -- they merely provide information and the captain makes his own decision," he said.
Smith told reporters that he thought the blame would eventually fall on the pilot, rather than technical faults at the airport or on the plane.
"The landing gear was kept in socket. That reflects that he realised the weather was not suitable for landing. He was a bit slow with his second thoughts," he said.
Tom Ballantyne, of industry publication Orient Aviation magazine, told AFP that most pilots were trained to deal with wind shear, but it could be very dangerous if it hit in bad conditions when the plane was close to the ground.
Many airports lacked wind shear detection systems and air traffic control relied on reports from pilots, he said, but added that the airport in Phuket should have been temporarily closed Sunday afternoon because of bad weather.
"I don't think the aircraft should have been landing in these kinds of conditions," he said, adding that the pilot said Sunday that he could not even see the runway.
But by the time the pilot asked to abort the landing, it was too late, Ballantyne said.
"To me (the cause) was a mixture of the weather and bad decision-making."
Vutichai said the flight data recorders -- known as black boxes -- would be sent to the United States with one week. Once US analysts received them, the results would be known in 10 days. - AFP/ac
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