Garuda death-flight pilot 'deliberately crashed plane'

PROSECUTORS will argue today that Garuda pilot Marwoto Komar deliberately crashed the Boeing 737-400 that ended up in a fireball off the runway at Yogyakarta, central Java, last year, killing 21 people, including five Australians.

A National Transportation Safety Committee report handed down late last year found that Captain Marwoto had failed to correct a "hot" landing profile during the final several kilometres of his approach to the airport on a routine Jakarta-Yogyakarta dawn commuter run. By the time he attempted to put the passenger jet on the runway, Captain Marwoto, 46, had ignored 15 automated audible cockpit warnings and several increasingly frantic pleas from his co-pilot, and was travelling at roughly twice the correct speed for landing.