Mozambique authorities say the captain of a Mozambique Airlines Embraer E-190 deliberately crashed the plane in Namibia last month killing all 33 people on board. As we reported in November, the aircraft, the newest in the airline’s fleet, went down in heavy rain on a flight to Angola. According to the BBC, Joao Abreu, head of the country’s Civil Aviation Institute told a news conference that Capt. Hermino dos Santos Fernandes had a “clear intention” and made a “deliberate series of maneuvers” to crash the airplane. The motive remains unknown.
Abreu told reporters that cockpit voice recordings revealed that Dos Santos Fernandes locked himself in the cockpit while the flight data recorder showed him descending the aircraft from its cruise altitude of 38,000 feet to less than 600 feet. “During these actions you can hear low and high-intensity alarm signals and repeated beating against the door with demands to come into the cockpit,” he was quoted as saying by state news agency AIM. For some reason, the captain reportedly let his FO back in the cockpit just before the aircraft hit the ground.
