Indonesia's Yogyakarta airport was operating without a license due to outstanding safety issues when 21 people were killed in an accident last year, an Australian air safety firm has found.
According to Australian air safety firm Flight Safety Pty, authorities had failed to implement five conditions for a license, including extending the runway and safety area.
The firm audited the airport at the request of an unnamed client.
Garuda's Boeing 737, with 140 people on board, bounced and skidded off the runway in Yogyakarta, before bursting into flames in a rice field in March 2007.
The aviation safety firm said Yogyakarta's operating license had ended on 1 August 2006 - eight months before the crash - because it had failed to fulfil the five conditions for the five-year license issued by Indonesian authorities, ABC News reports.
An Indonesian safety official denied the airport was functioning without a license.
"At that time [the licence] was still valid, but the RESA [Runway End Safety Area] was not long enough," Mardjono Siswo Suwarno of the National Transport Safety Committee said.
"But still in the [Garuda] case, even if the RESA length was adequate, the plane would have still overrun because the speed was 1.8 times normal speed."
Last year, Indonesian authorities attributed the crash to pilot error.
By Elizabeth Clifford-Marsh
