The Sriwijaya Air plane that crashed on Saturday flew nearly nine months last year, with air travel severely reduced due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Indonesian Ministry of Transport said when search teams searched one of the so-called black boxes of the plane from Java Sea.
The Boeing Co. “737-500 was inspected and declared airworthy before flying again,” the ministry said.
The plane carrying 62 people aboard the Indonesian carrier took off a few minutes after taking off from the capital Jakarta. There are presumably no survivors.
Divers and search crews, wrestling with sharp debris and low underwater visibility, managed to repair the plane’s flight data recorder on Tuesday, an important early step in discovering why SJ182 crashed.
The plane went off at the end of March, weeks after Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case, the transport ministry said. The plane resumed flying on December 19, after the inspection of the Ministry’s Directorate-General for Air Transport was cleared, the ministry said.