The Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed on Saturday did not fly for nearly nine months last year, with air travel greatly reduced due to the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia’s transport ministry said, while research teams they removed one of the so-called black boxes from the Java Sea plane.
The Boeing Co. 737-500 was inspected and declared aeronautical before resuming flight operations, the ministry said.
The Indonesian company’s plane with 62 people on board crashed minutes after leaving the country’s capital, Jakarta. There are believed to be no survivors.
Divers and crew, who faced sharp debris and low underwater visibility, managed to retrieve the plane’s flight data record on Tuesday, an important step in finding out why the SJ182 crashed.
The plane had ceased operations in late March, weeks after Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case, the transport ministry said. The plane began flying again on Dec. 19, after clearing an inspection by the ministry’s General Air Transportation Directorate, the ministry said.