Haunting of last photo family in jet horror
Smiling selfie before plane plunges into sea, killing 62
THIS heartbreaking selfie is the final picture taken by a mother aboard a plane that crashed into the sea killing 62 people on Saturday.
Ratih Windania posted the snap with her children laughing as they sat in their seats awaiting take-off – just minutes before the disaster in Indonesia.
Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 departed f rom the capital Jakarta f or a 90-minute flight over the Java Sea to the island of Borneo.
But just four minutes in, the Boeing 737-500 plunged nearly 10,000ft in less than 60 seconds, with witnesses claiming they heard two explosions. All passengers and crew on board are believed to have died.
Some of the poignant final messages and pictures sent by the doomed passengers have now been
‘Bye-bye family. We are heading home’
revealed, as rescuers located two black boxes yesterday.
Authorities have picked up signals from the sunken devices and divers are trying to retrieve them, along with body parts and wreckage.
Miss Windania’s last message read: ‘Bye-bye family. We’re heading home for now.’ She and her children had just spent three weeks with her relati ves before heading back to Pontianak, in the West Kalimantan area of Borneo.
Her brother Irfansyah Riyanto said they were originally planning to take an earlier flight but they changed at the last minute. He said: ‘ We feel powerless, we can only wait and hope to have any information soon.’
The six crew and 56 passengers on board the 26-year-old plane included three babies and seven other children. One of the passengers was Panca Widiya Nursanti, a teacher who was returning home to Pontianak after a short stay with her family. Her husband Rafiq Yusuf Al Idrus said: ‘I was joking by saying that when she arrived in Pontianak we would eat satay together.
‘She contacted me via WhatsApp at 2.05pm with laughter. She was already boarding the plane and she said the weather conditions were not good. I said pray a lot, please.’
A fisherman, named Solihin, said that he had been at sea when he witnessed the plane crash into the water
near to his boat. He told the BBC: ‘The plane fell like lightning into the sea and exploded in the water. It was pretty close to us, the shards of a kind of plywood almost hit my ship.
‘We thought it was a bomb or a tsunami since after that we saw the big splash from the water. It was raining heavily and the weather was so bad... We were very shocked and directly saw the plane debris and the fuel around our boat.’
Locals on a nearby island said they heard two explosions before discovering metal pieces, cables and fragments of clothing.
The cause of the accident remains a mystery, but more light should be shed when the black boxes are examined. Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation with more than 260million people, has been plagued by transport accidents.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea minutes after take-off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. The plane involved in Saturday’s disaster is an older version and did not have the controversial automated flight- control system that played a role in the Lion Air disaster and another crash involving another 737 Max 8 jet in Ethiopia five months later, leading to the grounding of all Max 8s for 20 months.
The Lion Air crash was Indonesia’s worst airline disaster since 1997, when 234 people were killed on a Garuda airlines flight which crashed on Sumatra island. Sriwijaya Air has had only minor incidents in the past.