The rudder travel limiter of the Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320 began acting up in January 2014. Attempts to fix it were unsuccessful, and failures became increasingly frequent. In the course of 74 flights between December 19 and December 27,2014, the airplane's electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system, or ECAM, reported more than 30 faults. Many crews, evidently advised that the system, which limits rudder deflection above 160 kias, was unreliable, simply left it alone if a fault occurred. On December 25, however, the captain of a departing flight in that aircraft, observing the fault annunciation just after pushback, summoned a maintenance technician. The technician resolved the problem by pulling and resetting the circuit breakers on the main flight computers. The pilot asked whether he could always use that technique to reset the limiter, and the technician replied that the pilot could "whenever instructed on the ECAM."
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