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Indonesia’s Lion Air Boeing 737-800 Crashes into the Ocean Minutes after Takeoff from Jakarta

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JAKARTA – A Lion Air flight with 188 people on board crashed into the sea just minutes after taking off from Indonesia’s capital on Monday.

Indonesia’s disaster agency posted photos online of a crushed smartphone, books, bags and parts of the aircraft fuselage that had been collected by search and rescue vessels that have converged on the area.

Spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the aircraft, on a 1 hour and 10 minute flight to Pangkal Pinang on an island chain off Sumatra, was carrying 181 passengers, including one child and two babies, and seven crew members.

The jet vanished from radar just 13 minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital, plunging into the ocean.

Indonesian TV broadcast pictures of a fuel slick and debris field.

The National Search and Rescue Agency said the flight ended in waters off West Java that are 30 to 35 metres deep.

The agency’s chief Muhammad Syaugi told a news conference that divers are trying to locate the wreckage.

The Boeing 737-800 plane departed Jakarta, about 6.20am for Pangkal Pinang. Data for Flight 610 on aircraft tracking website FlightAware ends just a few minutes following takeoff.

Search and Rescue Agency spokesman Yusuf Latif said authorities were still searching for the remains of the plane, which lost contact with air traffic control around 6.30am, en route to Pangkal Pinang on the island of Bangka.

“The plane crashed into water about 30 to 40 metres deep,” he told AFP.

Sindu Rahayu, directorate general of Civil Aviation at the transport ministry, said the aircraft was carrying 178 adult passengers, one child and two babies, with two pilots and five flight attendants.

“The plane had requested to return to base before finally disappearing from the radar,” he added in a statement.

The Flightradar website tracked the plane — which it said was a Boeing 737 — and showed it looping south on take-off and then heading north before the flight path ended abruptly over the Java Sea, not far from the coast.

Relatives of passengers comfort each other as they wait for news on a Lion Air plane that crashed off Java Island at Depati Amir Airport in Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia on Monday. (AP photo)

 

Indonesian TV showed dozens of people waiting anxiously outside the Pangkal Pinang airport and officials bringing out plastic chairs.

The crash is the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since an AirAsia flight plunged into the sea in December 2014, killing all 162 on board.

A report to the Jakarta Search and Rescue Office cited the crew of a tug boat which had reported seeing a Lion Air flight falling from the sky.

A telegram from the National Search and Rescue Agency to the air force has requested assistance with the search.

Indonesia relies heavily on air transport to connect its thousands of islands but has a poor aviation safety record and has suffered several fatal crashes in recent years.

A 12-year-old boy was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed eight people in mountainous eastern Indonesia in August.

In August 2015, a commercial passenger aircraft operated by Indonesian carrier Trigana crashed in Papua due to bad weather, killing all 54 people on board.

In 2014, an AirAsia plane crashed with the loss of 162 lives.

Indonesian investigators’ final report 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.

Lion Air, a low-cost airline, has been involved in a number of incidents.

Last year one of its Boeing jets collided with a Wings Air plane as it landed at Kualanamu airport on the island of Sumatra, although no one was injured.

In May 2016, two Lion Air planes collided at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta airport, while a month earlier a plane operated by Batik Air — part of the Lion Group — clipped a TransNusa plane.

In 2013 a Lion Air jet with a rookie pilot at the controls undershot the runway and crashed into the sea in Bali, splitting the plane in two. Several people were injured in the crash, although no one was killed.

Indonesia’s air travel industry is booming, with the number of domestic passengers growing significantly over the past decade, but it has acquired a reputation for poor regulation.

Last year the Indonesian air traffic controllers association revealed that the rate of take-off and landings in Jakarta allowed by state-run air navigation company AirNav was more than the airport could handle, increasing the chance of accidents.

The country’s carriers have in the past faced years-long bans from entering European Union and US airspace over their safety records.

Agence France-Presse

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