Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said flight SJ182 was delayed an hour before taking off at 14:36. The Boeing 737-500 disappeared from the radar four minutes later, after the pilot made contact with air traffic control to take off to an altitude of 29,000 feet (8,839 meters), he said.
The airline said in a statement the plane was on an estimated 90-minute flight from Jakarta to Pontianak, the capital of the western Kalimantan province on the Borneo island in Indonesia. The plane carried 50 passengers and 12 crew members, all Indonesian citizens, including six additional crew members for another trip.
Sumadi said a dozen vessels, including four warships, were deployed in a search-and-rescue operation centered between Lancang and Laki, part of the Thousand Islands chain just north of Jakarta.
Bambang Suryo Aji, the national search and rescue agency’s deputy head of operations and preparedness, said rescuers collected aircraft debris and clothing found by fishermen. They handed over the items to the National Transportation Safety Committee for further investigation to determine if they came from the missing plane.
A commander of one of the search-and-rescue ships named Eko said fishermen found cables and pieces of metal in the water.
“The fishermen told us they found them shortly after hearing an explosion like the sound of thunder,” Eko was quoted as saying by TVOne, adding that air fuel was found at the spot where the fishermen found the debris.
Aji said no radio beacon signal was detected from the 26-year-old plane. He said his agency was investigating why the plane’s emergency detection transmitter, or ELT, was not sending out a signal that could confirm whether it had crashed.
“The satellite system owned by neighboring Australia also did not pick up the ELT signal from the missing aircraft,” Aji said.
The tracking service Flightradar24 said on Twitter that Flight SJ182 lost more than 3048 meters in less than a minute in less than a minute, about four minutes after takeoff.
On television footage, family members and friends of people on board the plane were weeping, praying and embracing while waiting at airports in Jakarta and Pontianak.
The Chicago-based Boeing said in a statement: “We are aware of media reports from Jakarta regarding Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182. We are thinking of the crew, passengers and their families. We are in contact with our airline customer and stand Ready to support them in this difficult time. ‘
The twin-engine Boeing 737 with one gear is one of the world’s most popular short- and medium-haul aircraft. The 737-500 is a shorter version of the 737 model that is widely used. Airlines began using this type of aircraft in the 1990s, with production ending two decades ago.
Sriwijaya began operations in 2003 and flies to more than 50 destinations in Indonesia and a handful of nearby countries, according to its website. The fleet contains a range of 737 variants as well as the local ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop aircraft.
The airline has so far had a solid safety record, with no casualties on board in four incidents recorded in the Aviation Safety Network database, although a farmer died when a Boeing 737-200 left the runway in 2008 to a hydraulic problem.
Indonesia, the largest archipelago nation in the world, with more than 260 million people, has been plagued by transport accidents on land, sea and air due to overpopulation on ferries, outdated infrastructure and poorly enforced safety standards.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet operated by Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. The plane involved in Saturday’s incident did not have the automatic flight control system that played a role in the Lion Air crash and another crash of a 737 MAX 8 jet in Ethiopia five months later, which led to the basis of the MAX 8 for 20 months. .
The Lion Air crash was the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since 1997, when 234 people were killed on a Garuda Airlines flight near Medan on the island of Sumatra. In December 2014, an AirAsia flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore plunged into the sea, killing 162 people.
Indonesian airlines were previously banned from flying to the United States and the European Union because they did not meet international safety standards. Both have meanwhile lifted the ban, citing improvements in aviation safety and greater compliance with international standards.
Copyright © 2021 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.