The plane with 62 people on board and disappeared from the radars after taking off from Jakarta for an internal flight to Pontianak, crashed overboard off the coast of Jakarta, Indonesian authorities announced. On board were 56 passengers, including 10 children, and six crew members.
A spokesman for the Indonesian search and rescue agency said in a press conference that Boeing, from Sriwijawa Air, crashed in the Java Sea, just minutes after taking off from Sukarno-Hatta International Airport in the capital Indonesia, bound for Pontianak, capital of the West Kalimantan province, on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
The Spanish news agency Efe adds that the police, for their part, installed “a corpse identification post in a hospital in eastern Jakarta”, where the victims’ families and friends are moving. Search and rescue boats are being sent to the location where the plane crashed, according to the French news agency France Press.
Air traffic control this Saturday lost contact with a Boeing 737-500 that was making an internal flight, between Jakarta and Pontianak, just minutes after the plane had lifted. The aircraft, of the airline Sriwijawa Air, founded in 2003, took off from Jakarta on Saturday morning to Pontianak.
The plane will have lost “more than 10,000 feet in altitude in less than a minute, about 4 minutes after the departure of Jakarta”, according to Flightradar24, an aircraft tracking platform, cited by Reuters agency.
Sriwijaya Air flight # SJ182 lost more than 10.000 feet of altitude in less than one minute, about 4 minutes after departure from Jakarta.https://t.co/fNZqlIR2dz pic.twitter.com/MAVfbj73YN
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) January 9, 2021
Searches have already begun after fishermen found what appeared to be plane wreckage in waters north of the capital, Jakarta. A security official also told CNNIndonesia that he found “some cables, pieces of jeans, and pieces of metal in the water”.
The plane is a 27-year-old Boeing 737-500. Indonesia was the stage for the first serious accident with another model of the American manufacturer. The Boeing 737 MAX operated by Lion Air crashed in late 2018, killing 189 people. Another accident with the same new model from Boeing in Somalia led to the suspension of operations of these planes and an investigation by the American authorities.
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