Death crash pilot 'unfit to command a plane'

The pilot of a Singaporean passenger jet, which crashed into a jungle swamp four years ago, had a history of erratic behaviour in the cockpit and was unfit to be in command of a plane, a court heard yesterday.

All 104 people on board, including the pilot, Captain Tsu Way Ming, died when the SilkAir Boeing 737 flying from Jakarta to Singapore crashed on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The accident has never been satisfactorily explained and families of the victims believe Captain Tsu deliberately crashed in a suicidal act of mass murder.

Their lawyers cited two earlier breaches of regulations by the pilot. In March 1997, his co-pilot intervened when he tried to begin landing the plane when it was too high and too fast. Captain Tsu, instead of going around to try again, rolled the plane from side to side to try to slow it, the co-pilot, First Officer Lawrence Dittmar told the Singapore court. "The passengers, if they were anything like me, would have been scared," Mr Dittmer said. "I was scared."

Three months later, after a disciplinary inquiry into the incident, Captain Tsu had another disagreement with Mr Dittmer and switched off the cockpit voice recorder briefly. Michael Khoo, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the court: "With so little time elapsed since the inquiry, at which the two men were at loggerheads, [SilkAir] should have known that it would be unsafe to allow them to fly together."

He said he believed Captain Tsu did not respond properly to counselling and received no formal psychological assessment despite the two incidents, because the airline had failed to recognise that he needed psychological help.

The circumstances of the crash were sinister from the beginning. In clear weather, the plane plummeted in a near-vertical dive from 35,000ft. Accident analysts said the cockpit voice and data recorders had been switched off for at least half a minute beforethe plane began its descent.

Investigators for the US National Transportation Safety Board said the plane's wreckage showed that the engines were operating at high power at the moment of impact, and the controls were set to angle the plane nose down. "The airplane departed cruise flight as a result of an intentional manoeuvre requiring sustained manual flight control inputs that were most likely performed by the captain," the report concluded.

Captain Tsu had debts from stock trading, significant credit card bills, and a new $1m mortgage insurance policy which named his wife as the beneficiary.

Six relatives of the victims, from Britain, Malaysia, Singapore and the US, are suing SilkAir, a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, claiming the crash was caused by "wilful misconduct or default" by the pilot or negligence by the airline.