SilkAir pilot's erratic history revealed

The pilot of a Singaporean passenger jet that 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 has been told.

Among the 104 people killed when the SilkAir Boeing 737 crashed into Indonesia's Sumatra island during a flight from Jakarta to Singapore were two Aucklanders - businessman Kenneth Wilson, aged 43, and the plane's co-pilot, 23-year-old Duncan Ward.

The accident has never been explained, and families of the victims believe Captain Tsu Way Ming deliberately crashed his plane in a suicidal act of mass murder. Lawyers acting for the bereaved cited two examples of the pilot's breaches of airline regulations.

In March 1997, they said, his co-pilot intervened when he tried to start landing the plane when it was too high and travelling too fast. Three months later he had another disagreement with the same co-pilot, and briefly switched off the plane's cockpit voice recorder.

"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," the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Michael Khoo, told the court.

In clear weather, the plane plummeted in a near vertical dive from 35,000ft (10,668m). Analysts discovered the cockpit voice and data recorders had been switched off before the plane began its descent.

- INDEPENDENT