New details highlight Lion Air jet's problems before crash

Jakarta: New details about the crashed Lion Air's jet previous flight have cast more doubt on the Indonesian airline's claim to have fixed technical problems as hundreds of personnel searched the sea a fifth day Friday for victims and the plane's fuselage.

The brand new Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane plunged into the Java Sea early Monday, just minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.

Herson, head of Bali-Nusa Tenggara Airport Authority, said the pilot on the plane's previous flight on Sunday from Bali requested to return to the airport not long after takeoff but then reported the problem had been resolved.

Several passengers have described the problem as a terrifying loss of altitude.

Lion Air has said the unspecified problem was fixed after Sunday's flight, but the fatal flight's pilots also made a "return to base" request not long after takeoff. "Shortly after requesting RTB, the pilot then contacted the control tower again to inform that the plane had run normally and would not return" to Bali's Ngurah Rai airport, said Herson, who uses a single name. "The captain said the problem was resolved and he decided to continue the trip to Jakarta."

Data from flight-tracking websites shows both flights had highly erratic speed and altitude after takeoff, though confirmation is required from data recorded by the aircraft's "black box" flight recorders.

Investigators displayed one of the jet's two flight recorders at a news conference Thursday evening, later confirmed to be the flight data recorder, and said they would immediately attempt to upload information and begin analysis.

"In principle, all data we have obtained, including flight data and air navigation, and also from other sources we find that there have indeed been problems" with the plane, said Haryo Satmiko, deputy chairman of the National Transport Safety Committee.

"We will prove more technical problems with data recorded in the black box."

The steel-encased memory unit of the recovered flight recorder had separated from its base plate, showing the plane hit the sea at tremendous speed, he said.

Investigators say that is also indicated by the search and rescue effort finding many body parts rather than intact victims.

Satmiko said investigators had already contacted the pilot of the plane's Sunday flight.

The problems with it were "just as it circulates on media and social media," he said, referring to accounts of

passengers.