Indian pilot among victims of tragedy
Indian pilot Bhavye Suneja died yesterday after the Indonesian plane he captained with 188 passengers and crew on board the budget carrier crashed in the Java Sea, the Indian Embassy in Jakarta confirmed.
The aircraft was commanded by Captain Suneja and co-pilot Harvino with six cabin crew members.
Suneja has 6,000 flight hours and the co-pilot more than 5,000 flight hours, the airline said in a statement. He was a resident of Jakarta. He is originally from New Delhi and attended Ahlcon Public School in East Delhi’s Mayur Vihar.
Traffic saved man from doomed flight
An Indonesian man has described how Jakarta’s notorious traffic inadvertently saved his life on Monday after he arrived too late to catch the doomed Lion Air plane which plunged into the sea minutes after taking off.
Sony Setiawan, an official in Indonesia’s finance ministry, had meant to be on board the ill-fated flight JT610, a journey he and his colleagues caught on a weekly basis.
“I don’t know why the traffic at the toll road was so bad. I usually arrive in Jakarta at 3am but this morning I arrived at the
Lion Air: record plane deals, safety woes
airport at 6.20am and I missed the flight,” Setiawan said.
Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air leapt from obscurity to global fame in 2011 when it ordered 230 Boeing planes worth a whopping $22 billion (Dh80 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.”