A preliminary report on the crash found that the plane should have been grounded because of recurrent technical problems. Investigators are still working to pinpoint the exact cause of the disaster.
A preliminary report said that equipment failures and inadequate airline safety measures were contributing factors in the crash, but that it is still too early to pinpoint the exact cause.
Information collected from the flight's "black box" data recorder shows that the pilots struggled to control the airplane as an automatic anti-stall safety system kept pushing the plane's nose down.
"We still don't know yet, if it contributed or not," said Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator at Indonesia's transport safety committee (KNKT). "It is too early to conclude for now."
Problems known before crash
On October 29, the Boeing 737 MAX disappeared from the radar 13 minutes into the flight and plunged into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board.
The pilots on the previous flight had also reported the same problem, but had de-activated the anti-stall system and continued to fly manually.
Investigators said the pilots had reported the problem and Lion Air carried out safety checks on the plane, but deemed it safe to fly before the disaster.
Which of the world's 60 biggest airlines is the safest? Based on 2016 air safety data, Germany's JACDEC institute has compiled a ranking of carriers, showing that humans are still the biggest risk factor in air traffic.
Image: Reuters/E. Su
Unsafe China Airlines
About 3.7 billion passengers traveled by plane in 2016. Those who chose China Airlines as their carrier subjected themselves to the biggest risk, because the Taiwanese airline came in at the bottom of JACDEC's list of 60 globally operating carriers.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/D. Chang
Colombia's Avianca no alternative
The ranking was compiled on the basis of national air safety reports of the past 30 years. It measured the number of casualties and crashes against the airlines' traveled kilometers and passenger numbers. An airline without any loss of life and planes is given an index of zero to 0,001 points. Colombia's Avianca scored a value of 0.914 - the second-worst in 2016.
Image: AFP/Getty Images
High crash risk in Indonesia, too
Traveling with Garuda Indonesia - the third-worst performer on a score of 0.770 - isn't to be recommended either. Since its founding in 1950, the airline has reported 47 accidents - 22 of which have led to a total of 583 casualties.
Image: A.Berry/AFP/GettyImages
Ranking unbalanced?
But JACDEC's ranking has been criticized for not separately counting technical defects, human errors, weather incidents and terrorist attacks as reasons for plane crashes. Terrorism, for example, is really an airport safety problem; it accounts for 10 percent of accidents. Simon Ashley Bennett, an air safety expert at Leicester University, says a terror attack on a plane is as unlikely as...
Image: AP
Bad weather
... an incident of freak weather leading to an accident. Latest data say that 10 percent of them can be attributed to snow, ice, fog and storms. Lightning isn't as dangerous as many believe. More prone to cause crashes are...
Image: dapd
Technology glitches
Today's modern aircraft brim with technology. Small wonder then that technical defects account for about 20 percent of accidents, says Bennett, surpassed only by the biggest cause...
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Eisele
The human factor
Airline pilots are the biggest risk factor - they cause half of all accidents these days. Interaction between human beings and ever more complicated machines is prone to lead to mistakes, with the pilot always held accountable if something goes wrong.
Image: picture alliance/ROPI
Masters in the air
Yet, the 2009 crash landing in the Hudson River by Chesley Sullenberger shows that humans' piloting skills are not obsolete in modern aviation. Sullenberger's feat was only the third crash landing on water without casualties. All 155 passengers survived.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/S. Day
Scrap heap or repair?
Strangely enough, an aircraft that has been repaired after a crash gives an airline a better score with JACDEC than one that has been scrapped. Not a few experts question whether such a plane is really safe anymore.
Image: Reuters
More ambiguities
Further reason for criticism comes from the fact that an airline taken over by a rival has its score set back to zero by JACDEC. Lauda Air's 1991 crash with more than 200 casualties (see picture), for example, didn't affect the score of Austrian Airlines, which bought Lauda in 2004. Newly-founded airlines also start with zero points.
Image: picture alliance/dpa
And the winner is...
Hongkong-based Cathay Pacific was the safest airline in 2016, according to the rankiing of the Hamburg, Germany-based institute. Runners-up were Air New Zealand and China's Hainan Airlines. Germany's flagship carrier, Lufthansa, landed in 12th place. On balance, 2016 was among the years with the fewest accidents in aviation history.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Safer but deadly, too
Last year, JACDEC counted 321 deaths from plane crashes. But the Aviation Safety Network counted four deaths more due to a different inventory method. By far the worst aviation accident was that of a Bolivian charter flight carried out by LaMia, which crashed near Medellin, killing 71 people - among them almost the entire player roster of Brazilian football club AF Chapecoense.
Image: Reuters/F. Builes
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Room for improvement
The transport safety committee gave recommendations to Lion Air to improve its safety culture, in particular to increase pilots' knowledge of emergency procedures.
Budget airline Lion Air has become Southeast Asia's biggest carrier, despite a shoddy safety record and repeated complaints over bad service.
Indonesia's air-safety record has improved in recent years after the United States and the European Union recently lifted airspace bans on all of its airlines. The country recorded 40 fatal crashes in the last 15 years.
