Chairman of the Dutch National Safety Board Pieter van Vollenhoven told a press conference in The Hague that the instrument showing the height of the plane gave a wrong signal to the pilot of the Turkish plane crashed last week.

He said that the plane was flying actually 80 meters in height, but the heightmeter indicated a height of 18,000 meters.

As the weather was foggy and the two pilots and one trainee could not see where they were. When they realized the malfunction of the heightmeter, it was too low and too late to give more power to the engines of the plane. They missed the runway.

In such a situation, Vollenhoven said the pilots should have resorted to the manual control to land, but they used the automatic pilot instead.

Vollenhoven said further investigation would be conducted to see why the pilots did not use the manual control at such a situation.

(Xinhua News Agency March 4, 2009)