The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) on 28 November recommended that Lion Air must improve its safety culture and better document repair work on its planes, after a Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashed last month, killing all 189 people onboard.

Recovered aircraft debris from the crashed Lion Air flight JT610 laid out at the Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 1, 2018 (Photo: Reuters)

The NTSC gave the recommendation when announcing its preliminary findings into the accident. The Boeing 737 MAX vanished from radar about 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta on October 29, slamming into the Java Sea moments after it had asked to return to the capital.

The agency did not pinpoint a definitive cause of the accident, with a final crash report not likely to be filed until next year.

But its investigators said that Lion Air kept putting the plane back into service despite repeatedly failing to fix a problem with the airspeed indicator in the days leading up to the fatal flight.

The October 28 flight from Bali to Jakarta had experienced similar technical issues to the doomed flight the next day from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, said Nurcahyo Utomo, head of the NTSC.

The report also suggested the pilots struggled with the plane's anti-stall system as they radioed in a request to return to Jakarta's main airport.

Investigators have previously said the doomed aircraft had problems with its airspeed indicator and angle of attack (AOA) sensors, prompting Boeing to issue a special bulletin telling operators what to do when they face the same situation.

Black box data collected from their crashed plane showed that pilots struggled to maintain control as the aircraft's automatic safety system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down.

The investigators are focusing on whether faulty information from sensors led the plane's system to force the nose down.

(Source: VNA)