JAKARTA — The final moments of Lion Air Flight 610 as it hurtled soon after dawn from a calm Indonesian sky into the waters of the Java Sea would have been terrifying but swift.

The single-aisle Boeing aircraft, assembled in Washington State and delivered to Lion Air less than three months ago, appears to have plummeted nose-first into the water, its advanced jet engines racing the plane toward the waves at as much as 400 m.p.h. in less than a minute. The aircraft slammed into the sea with such force that some metal fittings aboard were reduced to powder, and the aircraft’s flight data recorder tore loose from its armored box, propelled into the muddy seabed.

As American and Indonesian investigators puzzle through clues of what went wrong, they are focusing not on a single lapse but on a cascade of troubling issues that ended with the deaths of all 189 people on board.

That is nearly always the case in plane crashes, in which disaster can rarely be pinned on one factor. While investigators have not yet concluded what caused Flight 610 to plunge into the sea, they know that in the days before the crash the plane had experienced repeated problems in some of the same systems that could have led the aircraft to go into a nose dive.