Lunatic

Johannesburg — A Mozambican Airlines
captain had a "clear intention" to crash an
airplane that went down in Namibia killing 33
at the end of November, according to a
preliminary investigation reported Saturday. Flight recorders showed flight TM470 went down on
November 29 while Captain Herminio dos Santos
Fernandes manipulated the Embraer 190's autopilot in a
way which "denotes a clear intention" to bring the plane
down, said Mozambican Civil Aviation Institute (IACM)
head Joao Abreu. "The reason for all these actions is unknown and the
investigation continues," said Abreu. The plane went down in torrential rains in the swamps of
Namibia's Bwabwata National Park on November 29,
killing its six crew and 27 passengers. It was flying from the Mozambican capital Maputo to
Luanda in Angola. 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 was
quoted as saying by state news agency AIM. 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 Abreu. The black boxes retrieved from the crash site were
analysed at the US National Transport Safety Board in
Washington. '''Newest plane in fleet
''' These indicated the aircraft was operating at normal
cruising altitude, and had good communications with
the control tower in the Botswana capital Gaberone. The Brazilian-manufactured aircraft was the newest
plane in the Mozambican Airlines fleet. The team of investigators includes experts from
Botswana, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, China, the US
and Namibia. Namibian investigators said earlier this week they had
detected "no mechanical malfunction" that could have
led to the crash. Three weeks after the incident forensic experts have
identified only seven of the 33 victims. The passengers were from Mozambique, Angola,
Portugal, Brazil, France and China. Dos Santos Fernandes had 9,053 flight hours, of which
1,395 as a captain. His licence was renewed in April
2012 and he underwent a medical exam last September,
according to Mozambican Airlines. The accident is the deadliest for Mozambique since a
plane carrying then-president Samora Machel crashed in
1986 in South Africa en route home from an African
leaders' summit. That crash, which claimed at least 34 lives, remains a
mystery, but speculation has lingered that it was linked
to tensions with the then-apartheid regime in South
Africa. The European Union banned Mozambican Airlines (LAM)
and all air carriers certified in Mozambique from flying in
its airspace in 2011, citing "significant safety
deficiencies".