Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said flight SJ182 was delayed an hour before taking off at 14:36. 8,839 meters), he said.
The airline said in a statement that the plane was on an estimated 90-minute flight from Jakarta to Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan province, on the Indonesian island of Borneo. The plane was carrying 50 passengers and 12 crew members, all of Indonesian nationality, including six additional crew members for another trip.
Sumadi said a dozen ships, including four warships, were deployed in a search and rescue operation centered between Lancang Island and Laki Island, which is part of the Thousand Islands chain in the United States. north of Jakarta.
Bambang Suryo Aji, chief of operations and preparedness at the National Search and Rescue Agency, said rescuers collected wreckage from planes and clothing found by fishermen. They handed the items to the National Transportation Safety Committee for further investigation to determine if they came from the missing plane.
A captain of one of the search and rescue boats carrying a single name, Eko, said fishermen found wires 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 the aviation fuel was found at the site where the fishermen found the debris.
Aji said no radio beacon signal had been detected since the 26-year-old plane. He said his agency was investigating why the plane’s emergency locator transmitter, or ELT, was not transmitting any signal that could confirm whether it had crashed.
“The satellite system owned by neighboring Australia also failed to pick up the ELT signal from the missing plane,” Aji said.
The tracking service Flightradar24 said in its Twitter feed that flight SJ182 lost more than 3,048 meters in altitude in less than a minute, about four minutes after takeoff.
Television footage showed relatives and friends of people on board the plane crying, praying and hugging while waiting at Jakarta and Pontianak airports.
Chicago-based Boeing said in a statement: “We are aware of the Jakarta reports on Sriwijaya Air’s SJ-182 flight. Our thoughts are with the crew, passengers and their families. We are in contact with our airline customer and we are ready to support them during this difficult time ”.
The single-engine twin-engine Boeing 737 is one of the most popular aircraft in the world on short- and medium-haul flights. The 737-500 is a shorter version of the widely used 737 model. Airlines began using this type of aircraft in the 1990s, and production ended two decades ago.
Sriwijaya began operating in 2003 and flies to more than 50 destinations in Indonesia and a handful of nearby countries, according to its website. Its fleet includes a variety of 737 variants, as well as the regional twin-engine ATR 72 turboprop aircraft.
The airline has so far had a solid safety record, with no casualties on board in four incidents recorded in the air safety network database, although one farmer died when a Boeing 737-200 went off the runway in 2008 after a hydraulic problem.
Indonesia, the largest archipelago nation in the world, with more than 260 million people, has been affected by land, sea and air transport accidents due to overcrowding of ferries, aging infrastructure and regulations security misapplied.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Lion Air entered the Java Sea a few minutes after taking off from Jakarta and killed all 189 people on board. The plane involved in Saturday’s incident did not have the automated flight control system that played a role in the Lion Air crash and another crash of a 737 MAX 8 plane in Ethiopia five months later, which which caused the MAX 8 to ground for 20 months.
The Lion Air crash was Indonesia’s worst airline disaster since 1997, when 234 people died on a Garuda airline flight near Medan on the island of Sumatra. In December 2014, an AirAsia flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore crashed into the sea and killed 162 people.
Previously, Indonesian airlines were banned from flying to the United States and the European Union for failing to comply with international safety standards. Both have lifted the ban, alleging improved air safety and greater compliance with international standards.
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