Indonesian jet with 62 aboard crashes into sea after takeoff

Indonesian jet with 62 aboard crashes into sea after takeoff

10.01.2021

A passenger jet carrying more than 60 people crashed into the Java Sea on Saturday, minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Indonesian officials said.

Indonesia’s transportation ministry said that the last contact with the plane, Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, was made at 2.40pm (1.10pm IST). The Boeing 737-524 was bound for the city of Pontianak on Borneo. It had 62 people aboard, according to an official from Sriwijaya Air, an Indonesian airline based in Jakarta.

Four minutes after taking off amid heavy rain, the 26-year-old plane lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than 60 seconds, according to Flightradar24, the flight-tracking service. The Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency said it had found pieces of debris in waters just northwest of Jakarta that it believed may be from the plane’s wreckage, but it said that darkness had impeded its search.

“Tomorrow we are going to survey the location,” Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, said. Indonesia’s navy had pinpointed the site of the missing aircraft and ships had been sent there, a navy official said. Authorities did not say whether they believed there were survivors.

The aviation sector in Indonesia has long been plagued by trouble. In 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 plunged into the Java Sea with 189 people aboard after the 737 Max jetliner’s antistall system, designed by Boeing, malfunctioned. Another 737 Max crashed in Ethiopia in 2019 after a similar erroneous activation of the antistall system, leading to the worldwide grounding of the entire Max fleet for nearly two years. On Thursday, the US government said that Boeing would pay more than $2.5 billion in a settlement with the justice department related to the antistall software.

The Sriwijaya Air plane, while a Boeing 737, was not a Max. Instead, it was from Boeing’s 737 500 series, which is considered a workhorse model with years of safe flying. Sriwijaya Air said in a preliminary statement on Saturday that “management is still communicating and investigating this matter and will immediately issue an official statement after obtaining the actual information”. The plane was in good condition, the airline’s CEO Jefferson Irwin Jauwena said. NYT & REUTERS

Relatives and friends of people aboard the plane waiting at a temporary crisis centre