NEW DELHI: Indonesian authorities have identified the body of Indian pilot Bhavya Suneja who captained the ill-fated Indonesian plane that crashed into the sea on October 29.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in a tweet, announced about the identification of Suneja's body.
"Indonesian authorities have confirmed identification of the body of Capt. Bhavya Suneja. The remains will be handed over to the family in the presence of @IndianEmbJkt today. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family," she tweeted.
The Lion Air flight, with 188 passengers and crew on board, crashed into the sea off Indonesia's island of Java, minutes after taking off from Jakarta Soekarno Hatta International Airport.
Captain Suneja, 31, was from Delhi.
After completing his studies at Ahlcon Public School in Mayur Vihar, Suneja received his flying licence in 2009.
He married in 2016 and was based in Jakarta.
On the other hand, Indonesian investigators on Friday said that Suneja and his colleague were battling multiple malfunctions almost as soon as the doomed flight began.
They faced a cacophony of warnings that started seconds after takeoff and continued for the remaining 11 minutes before the crash.
The alerts included a so-called stick shaker -- a loud device that makes a thumping noise and vibrates the control column to warn pilots they’re in danger of losing lift on the wings -- and instruments that registered different readings for the captain and copilot, according to data presented to a panel of lawmakers in Jakarta Thursday.
The data also showed that in the final seconds, as they struggled to pull the Boeing Co. 737 Max 8 out of a dive that was being commanded by the plane’s flight computers, the pilots were pulling back on the control column with a force of as much as 100 pounds of pressure.
However, the data indicated that the plane was controllable -- the pilots had kept it under control for about 10 minutes before the final plunge -- and records from the previous flight of the same jet showed another set of pilots had an identical set of failures and landed safely.
(With Inputs from Bloomberg)