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SilkAir Flight 185 - Pilot Suicide
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SilkAir Flight 185 - Pilot Suicide

48 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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SilkAir Flight 185 leaves Jakarta for Singapore on December 19, 1997, and forty minutes later dives into the Musi River, killing all 97 passengers and 7 crew. The film lays out why two official investigations reached opposite conclusions: Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee closes its file without a determined cause, citing inconclusive evidence, while the American NTSB uses computer modeling to argue the crash resulted from deliberate flight control inputs, most likely by the captain. A Los Angeles Superior Court jury, barred from hearing the NTSB's findings, reaches a different verdict entirely, blaming a defective servo valve in the rudder's Power Control Unit for an uncontrollable hardover. The documentary weighs both explanations side by side, including the pilot suicide theory that gained traction in the press but was never conclusively proven, and traces how the dispute ended not in a settled cause but in an out-of-court settlement between the families and the manufacturer. What stays open is the central question the case never resolved: mechanical failure or a pilot who put the plane down on purpose.