The pilot of a Mozambique Airlines flight that crashed killing all 33 people onboard brought it down deliberately, aviation officials said.
Flight recorders showed flight TM470 went down on November 29 while Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes manipulated the autopilot in a way which “denotes a clear intention” to bring the plane down, said Mozambican Civil Aviation Institute (IACM) head Joao Abreu.
The plane was heading for Angola, but went down in torrential rains in the swamps of Namibia’s Bwabwata National Park on November 29, killing its six crew and 27 passengers, including 10 Mozambican, nine Angolans, five Portuguese, and one citizen each from France, Brazil and China
Mr Abreu told a news conference that Dos Santos Fernandes locked himself inside the cockpit, ignored warning signals and did not allow his co-pilot back in moments before the Embraer 190 hit the ground.
“During these actions you can hear low and high-intensity alarm signals and repeated beating against the door with demands to come into the cockpit,” he said.
“All these operations required detailed knowledge of the plane’s controls, and showed a clear intention to crash the aircraft,” he said, adding that the pilot’s motives are unknown.
The altitude was manually changed three times from 38,000 feet to 592 feet - below ground level - and the aircraft’s speed was also changed manually, according to the preliminary report.
Airbrake parameters showed the spoilers, aerodynamic resistance plates on the wings, were deployed and held in that position until the end of the recordings, which proved the throttle was manually controlled.
“The plane fell with the pilot alert and the reasons which may have given rise to this behaviour are unknown. At the time, the co-pilot had left the cockpit and was absent while everything happened,” said Mr Abreu.
The black boxes retrieved from the crash site were analysed at the US National Transport Safety Board in Washington.
These indicated the aircraft was operating at normal cruising altitude, and had good communications with the control tower in the Botswana capital Gaberone.
The wreckage of the plane was found in the following days.