JAKARTA, 29 Oct 2018:
An aircraft with 189 people on board crashed into the sea and sank today soon after taking off – Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said the Lion Air passenger flight from Jakarta to the city of Pangkal Pinang off the island of Sumatra, had crashed.
“It has been confirmed that it has crashed,” Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for the agency, said by text message, when asked about the fate of the Lion Air plane.
Indonesian director-general of civil aviation Sindu Rahayu said the flight crashed at coordinates 05 46.15 south and 107 07.16 east after taking off from the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport here at 6.20am (7.20am in Malaysia).
A spokesman of the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta said the mission had yet to confirm whether any Malaysians were aboard the ill-fated flight.
At least 23 government officials were on board the plane, which an air navigation spokesman said had sought to turn back just before losing contact.
The plane lost contact 13 minutes after takeoff, the official said, adding that a tug boat leaving the capital’s port had seen the craft falling. The jet was a Boeing 737 MAX 8, according to air tracking service Flightradar 24.
Flight JT610 was due to have landed in the capital of the Bangka-Belitung tin mining hub at 7.20am local time, the tracking service showed.
Debris thought to be from the plane, including aircraft seats, was found near an offshore refining facility, an official of state energy firm Pertamina said.
Wreckage had been found near where the Lion Air plane lost contact with air traffic officials on the ground, said Muhmmad Syaugi, the head of the search and rescue agency.
“We don’t know yet whether there are any survivors. We hope, we pray, but we cannot confirm,” Syaugi told a news conference.
Preliminary flight tracking data from Flightradar24 shows the aircraft climbed to around 5,000 feet (1,524m) before losing, and then regaining, height, before finally falling towards the sea.
Data from FlightRadar24 shows the first sign of something amiss was around two minutes into the flight, when the plane had reached 2,000 feet (610m).
Then it descended more than 500 feet (152m) and veered to the left before climbing again to 5,000 feet (1,524m), where it stayed during most of the rest of the flight.
It was last recorded at 3,650 feet (1,113m) and its speed had risen to 345 knots, according to raw data captured by the respected tracking website, which could not immediately be confirmed.
Edward Sirait, chief executive of Lion Air Group, told reporters the aircraft had a technical problem on a flight from the resort island of Bali to Jakarta but it had been “resolved according to procedure”.
Sirait declined to specify the nature of the issue but said none of its other aircraft of that model had the same problem. Lion had operated 11 Boeing 737 Max 8s and it had no plan to ground the rest of them, he said.
Lion Air said the aircraft had been in operation since August, was airworthy, with its pilot and co-pilot together having accumulated 11,000 hours of flying time.
“The plane is so modern, it transmits data from the plane, and that we will review too. But the most important is the blackbox,” said Soerjanto Tjahjono – head of Indonesia’s transport safety committee.
Safety experts say nearly all accidents are caused by a combination of factors and only rarely have a single identifiable cause. The weather was clear, Tjahjono said.
The accident is the first to be reported that involves the widely-sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s workhorse single-aisle jet. The first Boeing 737 MAX jets were introduced into service in 2017.
Lion Air’s Malaysian subsidiary, Malindo Air, received the very first global delivery.
Indonesia’s worst air disaster was in 1997, when a Garuda Indonesia A300 crashed in the city of Medan killing 214 people.
Founded in 1999, Lion Air’s only fatal accident to date was in 2004, when an MD-82 crashed upon landing at Solo City, killing 25 of the 163 people on board, the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network says.
However, six other Lion Air jets, including one that crash-landed in the water short of the runway at the Indonesian resort island of Bali in 2013, were damaged beyond repair in various accidents, according to Aviation Safety Network.
Lion Air was removed from the European Union’s air safety blacklist in June 2016.
The privately owned airline in April announced a firm order to buy 50 Boeing 737 MAX 10 narrowbody jets with a list price of US$6.24 billion. It is one of the US planemaker’s largest customers globally.
– Reuters, Bernama