Reports of what happened on Air Asia Flight QZ8501 are beginning to trickle out but should be viewed with a very healthy dose of skepticism. Why? Because the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) has a history that includes a major coverup involving mass murder / suicide committed by a pilot in 1997, as Shoebat.com reported.

The pilot of QZ8501, a Muslim, was an extremely seasoned pilot with more than 20,000 hours of flight experience and nearly a decade spent as a fighter pilot. There is also no disputing that weather conditions were bad at the time of the crash but other seasoned pilots will tell you that Captain Iriyanto had the ability, duty and wherewithal to avoid putting that plane in the danger it was in, even more so based on his experience level.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR) have both been recovered and are being analyzed. The NTSC is making some interesting public statements, including declarations that there were no signs of terrorism revealed on the recordings and that while the pilots’ voices can be heard, what they were saying cannot be determined:

Audio recordings from the cockpit of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 contain no sounds of gunfire or explosions, making it unlikely the plane was brought down by terrorism, Indonesian investigators say.

The aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder, which captures all noises on the flight deck, was recovered last week from the depths of the Java Sea, along with the other so-called black box, the flight data recorder.

“The voice from the cockpit does not show any sign of a terrorist attack. It is only the pilot, sounding very busy,” Andreas Hananto, an investigator at Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, said in an interview with the news agency Reuters.

He said Monday that investigators had heard “no threats” in the recordings.

“We didn’t hear any voice of other persons other than the pilots,” Nurcahyo Utomo, another investigator, told Reuters.

But it remains a mystery what brought down the aircraft on December 28 as it flew from the Indonesian city of Surabaya toward Singapore with 162 people on board.

When it comes to the coverup of what happened to Silk Air Flight MI185, the NTSC did something on par with holocaust denial. U.S. investigators and even lower level investigators with NTSC determined conclusively that the pilot of that plane intentionally crashed into an Indonesian river but the lead investigator overruled all of it. The NTSC has yet to correct the record or make things right.

This is the same body that is investigating QZ8501, as Shoebat.com reported.

To be clear, it still is not known what brought the plane down but it sure would be nice to see the NTSC called out on its checkered past. In court, that past is akin to a witness who has been found to be lacking in credibility. In this CNN report, the claim that there are no signs of terrorism is repeated. As for the pilots, the investigator will only say their voices sounded ‘very busy’, not what they said specifically: