On December 24, 2014, AirAsia Flight 8501 took off from Surabaya (Indonesia) at 5.30 am local time. With 155 passengers and 7 crew members onboard, the flight was headed to Singapore. About 43 minutes into its flight, the Airbus A320 disappeared from the radar. The worst had come to pass. Two days later, the rescue team discovered the plane wreckage in Java sea. All 162 people onboard perished in the crash.
The crash investigation revealed that it was a pilot error. The in command Captain Iriyanto — a 53-year old former Indonesian Air Force pilot — performed a non-standard reset of the onboard flight control computers. Which means he did something which was not mentioned anywhere in any of the operating manuals. Why would someone with an experience of more than 20,000 flight hours do such a thing?