Lion Air crash: Pilots struggled though instruction manual to understand plane's plunging into Sea

The cockpit voice recorder of Lion Air Flight 610, which drowned in Java Sea with 189 people on board in October last year, shows that the pilots struggled through pages of plane's instruction manual at the last moment to understand why it was lurching downwards off the coast of Indonesia, local media reported on Wednesday.

Reports said the pilots desperately looked the handbook but went short of time before the Max 8 aircraft hit the waters.

The investigation comes after the United States Transport Department on Tuesday directed its internal watchdog to conduct an inquiry into the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) approval of the Boeing737 MAX 8.

The Boeing aircraft, which has been involved in two major crashes in the last five months, has been grounded by scores of governments and airlines citing safety concerns. The Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 claimed lives of all 157 people on board.

According to a preliminary report, the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 was blamed due to erroneous data from a sensor which was causing the plane's new automated stabiliser system to push the aircraft's nose down.

The pilots of the ill-fated jet tried hard to pull the plane up but kept on descending before it ultimately plunged into the Java Sea.

Investigators examining the Lion Air crash are considering how a computer, among other factors, ordered the plane to dive in response to data from a faulty sensor and whether the pilots had enough training to respond appropriately to the emergency, the reports said.

It is the first time the voice recorder contents from the Lion Air flight have been made public.

Quoting sources, the report further mentioned that the 31-year-old captain of the Lion Air flight tried in vain to find the right procedure in the handbook, while the 41-year-old first officer was unable to control the plane.

The Indian-born captain, Captain Bhavya Suneja, remained silent at the end, as the Indonesian first officer said "Allahu Akbar", or "God is greatest", a common Arabic phrase in the majority-Muslim country that can be used to express excitement, shock, praise or distress, sources said.

Ethiopia's transport minister Dagmawit Moges on Sunday said that the black box data of Ethiopian Airlines indicated "clear similarities" between the crash that took place last week and Lion Air which crashed in Indonesia last year.

Meanwhile, Boeing, in a statement, said that it remains confident in the safety of the jets, but that it recommended the shutdown itself "out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety.