The families' lawyer, Michael Khoo, told the city-state's three-judge Court of Appeal that the crash of SilkAir flight MI185 in Indonesia, killing all 104 aboard, was deliberately engineered by the pilot, Captain Tsu Way Ming.

SilkAir is a regional-service subsidiary of Singapore Airlines Ltd.

Khoo reproduced evidence he had presented during last year's trial to support his arguments that Tsu was facing financial problems and had committed a series of safety breaches in the nine months before the crash.

"In the nine months prior to the crash, Captain Tsu had committed three infractions of the safety code he was trained to and required to observe," Khoo said.

"These included deliberately disabling the circuit breaker of the cockpit voice recorder of another aircraft six months before, so as to preserve a personal cockpit conversation."

There was no reason why the Boeing 737, which was less than 10 months old with 2000 hours of flying service, would crash suddenly from its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet (10,606 metres) without any warning, Khoo said.

The plane, which had no reported mechanical or structural problems, was still tracked on the radar screen of Indonesian flight controllers, and was in radio communication until its rapid plunge into a river on Sumatra island, he said.

Khoo argued his clients' case was "that the crash of the aircraft was intentional... done recklessly and with knowledge that damage would result."

Justice Tan Lee Meng, in a ruling issued last October, dismissed the families' lawsuit because they "did not discharge the burden in proving their assertions" that the crash was caused by intentional pilot action.

SilkAir maintained that the victims' families should not be compensated more than US$75,000 each, as set down under the Warsaw Convention governing compensation in air crashes, because they had no evidence to support their claim.

Chief Justice Yong Pung How, who heads the three-member Court of Appeal, said Monday that he would make judgement known at a later date.

A three-year inquiry by Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee failed to determine what caused the crash on December 19, 1997, SilkAir's first, killing all 104 passengers and crew on board.

The results of the Indonesian inquiry said there was insufficient evidence to prove the pilot had deliberately crashed the plane to commit suicide.

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