‘It is a time-out condition’: Doomed pilots’ final moments in cockpit revealed

As their Boeing MAX 8 plane plunged into a nosedive, the frantic Lion Air pilots desperately searched for answers in the plane’s handbook.

Pilots on the doomed Lion Air flight were frantically flicking through the plane’s manual to try to understand why it was lurching downwards in the final moments before it crashed, according to people familiar with the chilling cockpit voice recordings.

Investigators are still working to figure out why the Boeing MAX 8 crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people. The incident has again come under the spotlight as investigators search for possible links between it and last week’s similar crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people.

The similarity of both crashes has raised serious safety questions about Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft, which has now been grounded worldwide.

All Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft have been suspended following the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes. Picture: Adek Berry/AFP

Investigators into the Lion Air crash are looking at a computer system on the MAX 8 jet and how data from a faulty sensor caused it to send the plane into a dive.

They are also looking at whether the Lion Air pilots had enough training to respond appropriately to the emergency.

In what is the first time the contents of the Lion Air’s cockpit voice recorders have been made public, three sources told Reuters the captain asked the first officer to check the plane’s handbook in the final minutes before the plane plunged into the Java Sea after a short and erratic flight.

According to Reuters’ report, the captain was at the control of the near brand-new plane when it took off from Jakarta.

Those on board the Lion Air plane experienced the plane's sickening drops in altitude. The blue line indicates the ‘erratic’ altitude while the yellow line indicates speed. Picture: FlightRadar24

After two minutes, the first officer reported a “flight control problem” to air traffic control. The captain asked the first officer to check the quick reference handbook that contained checklists for abnormal events, the first source told Reuters.

For the next nine minutes, “the jet warned pilots it was in a stall and pushed the nose down in response”, according to the report.

The captain tried to get the plane to climb upwards, but the jet’s computer system kept pushing the nose down. It appeared the system was incorrectly sensing a stall.

A navy diver recovers the black box from the crash site of the Lion Air plane. Picture: Adek Berry/AFP

On a plane, trim adjusts an aircraft’s control surfaces to keep it flying straight and level.

“They didn’t seem to know the trim was moving down,” the third source told Reuters.

“They thought only about airspeed and altitude. That was the only thing they talked about.”

The pilots — the captain, 31, and the first officer, 41 — remained calm for most of the flight.

It was right before the crash the captain asked the first officer to check the manual as he struggled to control the plane.

Officials move an engine recovered from the crashed Lion Air jet. Picture: AP/Achmad Ibrahim

“It is like a test where there are 100 questions, and when the time is up you have only answered 75,” the third source said. “So you panic. It is a time-out condition.”

In the last seconds before the plane plunged into the water, killing everyone on board, the Indian-born captain was silent, and the first officer, from Indonesia, said “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is greatest”.

Lion Air and Boeing have not commented on Reuters’ report.