Air Boeing 737 plane with 62 passenger crashed in Indonesia
The Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737 plane disappeared from radar screens shortly after take-off (file photo)
A Boeing 737 passenger plane carrying 62 people is believed to have crashed into the sea shortly after take-off from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta.
The Sriwijaya Air disappeared from radars four minutes into its journey to Pontianak in West Kalimantan province.
It is thought to have dropped more than 3,000m (10,000ft) in less than a minute, according to flight tracking website Flightradar24.com.
Witnesses said they had seen and heard at least one explosion.
Fisherman Solihin, who goes by one name, told the BBC Indonesian service he had witnessed a crash and his captain decided to return to land.
“The plane fell like lightning into the sea and exploded in the water,” he said.
“It was pretty close to us, the shards of a kind of plywood almost hit my ship.”
A number of residents of an island near where the plane disappeared told the BBC they had found objects they thought were from the plane.
IMAGE COPYRIGHTMULYONO/NAKISearch and rescue efforts were suspended overnight but were due to resume on Sunday.
The Indonesian navy was reportedly deployed to look for the aircraft on Saturday. Navy official Abdul Rasyid told Reuters news agency it had determined the plane’s coordinates and ships had been deployed to the location.
The aircraft is not a 737 Max, the Boeing model that was grounded from March 2019 until last December following two deadly crashes.
Difficult questions
Last contact with the plane, with the call sign SJY182, was made at 14:40 local time (07:40 GMT), according to the transport ministry. The usual flight time to Pontianak, in the west of the island of Borneo, is 90 minutes.
It did not send a distress signal, according to the head of national search and rescue agency Air Marshal Bagus Puruhito.
There were thought to be 50 passengers – including seven children and three babies – and 12 crew on board, though the plane has a capacity of 130. Everyone on board was Indonesian, officials say.
Relatives of the passengers have been waiting anxiously at the airport in Pontianak, as well as at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
“I have four family members on the flight – my wife and my three children,” Yaman Zai told reporters through tears.
“[My wife] sent me a picture of the baby today… How could my heart not be torn into pieces?”
According to registration details, the plane is a 26-year-old Boeing 737-500.
It was in good condition, Sriwijaya Air chief executive Jefferson Irwin Jauwena told reporters. Take-off had been delayed for 30 minutes due to heavy rain, he said.
Relatives of those on board are waiting anxiously for news
Sriwijaya Air, founded in 2003, is a local budget airline which flies to Indonesian and other South-East Asian destinations.
The plane went missing about 20km (12 miles) north of the capital Jakarta, not far from where another flight crashed in October 2018.
A total of 189 died when an Indonesian Lion Air flight plunged into the sea about 12 minutes after take-off from the city.
That disaster was blamed on a series of failures in the plane’s design, but also faults by the airline and the pilots.
It was one of two crashes that led regulators to pull the Boeing 737 Max from service. The model resumed passenger flights in December after a systems overhaul.
The BBC’s Jerome Wirawan in Jakarta says the latest events will bring up difficult questions and emotions in Indonesia, whose airline industry has faced intense scrutiny since the Lion Air crash.
Broadcaster Kompas TV quoted local fishermen as saying they had found debris near islands just off the coast of the capital Jakarta, but it could not be immediately confirmed as having belonged to the missing jet.
Authorities and the airline gave no immediate indication as to why the plane suddenly went down.
But transport minister Mr Sumadi said the jet appeared to deviate from its intended course just before it disappeared from radar.
Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement offering his “sincere condolences” over the incident.
The budget airline, which has about 19 Boeing jets that fly to destinations in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, said only that it was investigating the loss of contact.
In October 2018, 189 people were killed when a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX jet slammed into the Java Sea about 12 minutes after take-off from Jakarta on a routine one-hour flight.
That crash – and a subsequent fatal flight in Ethiopia – saw Boeing hit with $2.5 billion USD in fines over claims it defrauded regulators overseeing the 737 MAX model, which was grounded worldwide following the two deadly crashes.
The Boeing jet thought to have crashed Saturday is not a MAX model and was 26 years old, according to authorities.
“We are aware of media reports from Jakarta, and are closely monitoring the situation,” the US-based planemaker said in a statement.
“We are working to gather more information.”
Indonesia’s aviation sector has long suffered from a reputation for poor safety, and its airlines were once banned from entering US and European airspace.
In 2014, an AirAsia plane crashed with the loss of 162 lives.
Domestic investigators’ final report on the AirAsia crash showed a chronically faulty component in a rudder control system, poor maintenance and the pilots’ inadequate response were major factors in what was supposed to be a routine flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.
A year later, in 2015, more than 140 people, including people on the ground, were killed when a military plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Medan on Sumatra island.
