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Part of the tail of AirAsia QZ8501 floats on the surface after being lifted as Indonesian navy divers conduct search operations for the black box flight recorders and passengers and crew of the aircraft, in the Java Sea January 10, 2015. Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501, with 162 people on board, lost contact with air traffic control during bad weather on Dec. 28, less than half way into a two-hour flight from Indonesia to Singapore. There were no survivors. REUTERS/Adek Berry/Pool REUTERS/Adek Berry/Pool

A preliminary report surrounding the December 2014 crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 has been submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organisation. However, its details, which were never made public, seem to have leaked and hinted of a computer glitch and pilot error as potential causes for the fatal crash that killed all 162 people on board.

Investigators looking into the crash theorised an outage of the twin Flight Augmentation Computers (FAC) may have occurred as the Airbus A320 jet climbed abruptly and then stalled. But the glitch isn’t the sole reason being probed into. The pilots’ reaction to such abnormality is also being considered.

At least two unidentified people “familiar with the matter” told Reuters they believed the FAC suffered a glitch on Dec 28. Without them, the pilots were rendered blind and thus would need to rely on experience and on manual flying skill abilities to control the wayward plane and put it into its proper position.

The FAC system of the Airbus A320 is responsible for “controlling rudder movements and helping to keep the airplane stable, as well detecting windshear, or sudden changes in wind speed or direction,” Reuters said. A report by Indonesian magazine Tempo, however, noted that particular aircraft’s computerised rudder system had actually been in a series of maintenance problems long before Flight QZ8501 got lost in the radar on Dec 28.

But assuming the two FACs did encounter a glitch, an unidentified Airbus spokesman maintained the aircraft “remains fully controllable” by its pilots. Which now puts the spotlight on the co-pilot who investigators believed was the one in control when the Airbus A320 began its dangerous ascent.

A report by the Wall Street Journal said investigators believed it was First Officer Rémi-Emmanuel Plesel, a French national, who was in-charge of the controls then, flying the aircraft, trying to avoid a storm cell from Surabaya, Indonesia enroute to Singapore. While investigators suspect turbulence was a factor to the plane’s dramatic climb, it was also worthy to take note how the pilots tried to control and manage the situation with a malfunctioning FAC.

“The flight-data recorder … indicates the first officer’s control stick pulled the plane’s nose up. But it isn’t clear when those commands occurred in the sequence of events, or why they were initiated,” the WSJ report said. Co-pilot Plesel only had about 2,200 flight hours over roughly three years flying for AirAsia, compared to Captain Iriyanto who had logged 20,537 hours of flight time, 6,053 of which are with AirAsia. The latter was a former fighter pilot.

David Learmount, operations and safety editor for Flightglobal, in an article posted at Brisbane Times early in January 2015, said at least 1800 airline passengers and crew have been killed over the past two decades because “pilots simply lost control of their aircraft.”

A study by the US Federal Aviation Administration delved into the situation and found that training afforded to recent pilots are “somewhat incompatible with the way airplanes are built and designed today … there is a fundamental misunderstanding going on between man and machine."