Delhi captain among 189 dead was expected home for Diwali
The carrier was banned from European airspace in 2016, with other Indonesian airlines
NEWDELHI/JAKARTA: Captain Bhavye Suneja, a 31-year-old Indian with 6,000 hours of flying experience, was at the controls of the Lion Air jet that crashed into the sea with 189 people on board after a sudden and sharp dive on Monday, just minutes after taking off from Jakarta.
Assisted by co-pilot Harvino, who went by only one name, Suneja was flying the nearly new Boeing 737 MAX 8 when it lost contact with ground officials, 13 minutes after departing from the Indonesian capital.
From Delhi’s Mayur Vihar, Suneja studied at the Ahlcon Public School till 2005. Neighbours said his family was expecting Suneja home this Diwali.
While the airline captain’s immediate family refused to share any information, his cousin Kapish Gandhi spoke to The Guardian about the incident.
He said Suneja’s parents learned of the disaster early in the morning and were booked to fly to Jakarta the same night. “He loved his job, he was very much interested in it,” the report quoted Gandhi as saying. “We saw it on television this morning and didn’t know whether to believe it,” he added. “We are all speechless.”
Lion Air Flight JT 610 was flying north from Jakarta to the city of Pangkal Pinang on the island of Bangka when it went down in the Java Sea. The National Search and Rescue Agency said that a tugboat crew saw the plane crash in Karawang Bay northeast of Jakarta and that skies were clear.
By Monday afternoon, rescuers said it was unlikely that survivors would be found.
“I suspect all the passengers are dead,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Bambang Suryo, director of operations for the search and rescue agency.
A spokesperson for Indonesia’s air navigation authority said the aircraft crew had requested permission to turn around minutes after takeoff. “The request was permitted,” the spokesperson said. “Then we lost contact. It was very quick, maybe around one minute.”
According to the flight captain’s Linkedin profile, he received his pilot’s licence from Bel Air International in 2009.
He was associated with Lion Air as an airline pilot since March 2011. It said that before Lion Air, Suneja also served as a trainee pilot with Emirates for three months in 2010.
Emirates, however, denied hiring him. “Emirates can confirm that the pilot was never an employee or trainee at Emirates airline,” it said in a statement.
SINGAPORE: Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air leapt from obscurity to global fame in 2011 when it ordered 230 Boeing planes worth a whopping $22 billion, the US maker’s biggest ever deal, but it has been dogged by safety issues for years.
When co-founder Rusdi Kirana was asked months later if bank loans would be needed to finance the purchase, he told reporters at the 2012 Singapore Airshow: “I am the bank.”
Founded in 1999 by brothers Rusdi and Kusnan Kirani, the budget carrier began operations in 2000 as Indonesia’s first lowcost carrier, using a leased Boeing 737-200 between Jakarta and Denpasar, capital of the resort island of Bali.
It quickly rode the crest of Indonesia’s soaring domestic air travel sector to become the country’s biggest private airline and second largest in Southeast Asia after Malaysian carrier Airasia.
A boom in demand in the archipelago, the world’s fourth most populous nation, prompted Lion Air to go on an aircraft-buying spree that made headlines around the world starting in 2011.
With then US President Barack Obama as a witness, Boeing and Lion Air signed the record deal on the sidelines of an Asian summit in Bali for the purchase of 29 737-900s and 201 orders of the new 737 MAX, along with options for 150 more aircraft.
The orders were worth $21.7 billion at list prices, with the US aircraft maker describing it as “the largest commercial plane order ever in Boeing’s history by both dollar volume and total number of planes”.
But Lion Air soon surpassed that record when it ordered 234 medium-haul A320 planes from Airbus worth a whopping $24 billion at catalogue prices in 2013.
The carrier currently operates domestic flights and a number of international routes in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Middle East.
However, it has struggled with issues of safety and poor management and was banned, along with other Indonesian airlines, from flying into European airspace until 2016.