SilkAir 185: Crash, Controversy, and the Questions That Endure
SilkAir 185: Crash, Controversy, and the Questions That Endure
On December 19, 1997, a routine hop from Jakarta to Singapore ended in seven violent minutes over South Sumatra. SilkAir Flight 185, a Boeing 737-300, plunged into the Musi River, leaving no survivors-and launching one of the most contested investigations in modern aviation.
In this clear, unsensational account, Linda Davidson reconstructs the final flight, the river recovery, and the hangar-floor reassembly that followed. She sets the human factors and the hardware side by side: a cockpit voice recorder that stopped before the dive, a flight data recorder that captured a rapid, sustained descent, and a 737 control system with a troubled rudder history. Where agencies disagreed-the Indonesian NTSC's "undetermined" conclusion, the U.S. NTSB's submission pointing to deliberate cockpit inputs-Davidson explains what each relied on, what each rejected, and why the case has never truly closed.
Inside you'll find:
A minute-by-minute chronology of the last segment of flight and the first days of the search.
How recorders, radar, hydraulics, and control surfaces actually work-decoded for general readers.
The competing frames: intentional flight-deck inputs vs. uncommanded control anomalies, including what the wreckage and metallurgy can (and cannot) prove.
The courtroom aftermath in Singapore and the United States, and what those rulings did-and didn't-settle.
The legacy: changes to 737 flight-control oversight, data-recording standards, and pilot-wellbeing policies.
Meticulous, compassionate, and fiercely factual, SilkAir 185 is narrative investigation for readers who want evidence over spectacle. It neither rushes to judgment nor looks away from hard possibilities. Instead, it maps what we know, marks what we don't, and shows why some questions still endure-long after the headlines fade.
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