Air tragedy:
189 feared dead in Indonesian jet plunge
SOME 189 people are feared dead after a Lion Air passenger flight crashed into the sea yesterday, shortly after taking off from the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
The plane was heading to the city of Pangkal Pinang off the island of Sumatra when it lost contact with air traffic control at 6.30am (11.30pm GMT), 13 minutes after take-off.
“The plane had requested to return to base before finally disappearing from the radar,” said Sindu Rahayu, directorgeneral of civil aviation at the country’s transport ministry.
Lion Air said the aircraft, a brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8, was carrying 181 passengers, including one child and two babies, and eight crew members. There were two foreigners on board the plane: its pilot, originally from New Delhi, and an Italian citizen.
Operation director Bambang Suryo Aji told reporters: “My prediction is that nobody survived because the victims that we found, their bodies were no longer intact. And it’s been hours, so it is likely 189 people have died.”
Rescuers in inflatable boats retrieved human remains, pieces of aircraft and personal belongings from the Java Sea after the jet crashed.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the rescue agency, tweeted pictures of debris including a crushed smartphone, books, bags and parts of the aircraft fuselage gathered by search craft. Boats in the area were also said to have retrieved body parts.
Distraught friends and relatives prayed and hugged each other as they waited at Pangkal Pinang’s airport.
At the National Search and Rescue Agency headquarters in Jakarta, family members turned up, hoping desperately for news.
Edward Sirait, chief executive of Lion Air Group, told reporters the aircraft had a technical problem on an earlier flight from the resort island of Bali to Jakarta but it had been “resolved according to procedure”. He 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.
The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 Max, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s workhorse single-aisle jet.
Privately owned 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 went down in waters about 30-35 metres deep. Bambang Suryo, operational director of the search and rescue agency, said about 150 rescuers and 40 divers were on the site, using an underwater drone to search for the fuselage, where many of the victims were believed to be trapped. “We need to find the main wreckage,” he said.
Another agency official, Deden Ridwansyah, said authorities were focusing on an area about one nautical mile (1.8km) in radius, based on debris found on the water,
and floodlights would be used to search through the night.
The flight took off in clear weather at around 6.20am and was due to have landed in Pangkal Pinang at 7.20am.
Distraught relatives of those on board arrived at the airport in Jakarta and Pangkal Pinang.
“Be patient, pray the best for papa,” a woman arriving at Jakarta airport told a sobbing girl. One relative, Feni, who uses a single name, said her soon-to-be-married sister was on the flight, planning to meet relatives in Pangkal Pinang.
“We are here to find any information about my younger sister, her fiance, her in-law to be and a friend,” said Feni. “We don’t have any information,” she said. “No one provided us with any information that we need. We’re confused. We hope our family is still alive.”
An official of Indonesia’s transport safety committee said the cause of the crash would not be known until the cockpit voice recorder and data recorder were recovered.
“We will collect all data from the control tower,” Soerjanto Tjahjono said.
“The plane is so modern, it transmits data from the plane and that we will review too. But the most important is the black box.”
The Flightradar website tracked the plane, showing it looping south on take-off and then heading north before the flight path ended abruptly over the Java Sea, near the coast.
Preliminary flight tracking data from the website shows the aircraft climbed to around 5,000ft before losing, and then regaining, height, before finally falling towards the sea.
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. (Daily Telegraph, London)