Indonesian jet crashes into sea; 189 likely lost

Plane was headed to island city when flight went awry.

BANGKOK — A plane carrying 189 people from Jakarta to a smaller Indonesian city crashed into the Java Sea on Monday, prompting hard questions about the safety of the skies over a vast island nation dependent on air travel.

Lion Air Flight 610 had been flying north from the capital, Jakarta, to the city of Pangkal Pinang on the island of Bangka when it went missing minutes after takeoff, officials said. 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, offi- cials speculated that no one had survived.

“I suspect all the passengers are dead,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Bambang Suryo, director of operations for the search and rescue agency.

Yohanes Sirait, a spokes- man for the country’s air navigation authorities, said that the aircraft crew had requested permission to turn around minutes after takeoff.

“The request was per- mitted,” Sirait said. “Then we lost contact. It was very quick, maybe around one minute.”

The final contact with the plane was within 15 minutes of the flight taking off.

The crash is another s etback for Ind o nesia’s fast-growing aviation sec- tor, which has been trou- bled for years by safety problems but had recently shown signs of progress. In June, the European Union lifted a ban on Indonesian airlines that it had imposed in 2007, citing “unaddressed safety concerns.”

Indonesian officials said a search and rescue effort was underway for the Boeing 737 MAX 8, which departed Jakarta at 6:21 a.m. Monday. The aviation website Flight Tracker said the flight had been scheduled to arrive at 7:20 a.m. in Pangkal Pinang, on an island off Sumatra.

Officials said that rescue workers had arrived at the crash site, 2 nautical miles south of the aircraft’s last reported coordinates. The 178 passengers included two infants, one other child and at least 20 officials from the country’s Ministry of Finance, they said.

By Monday night, authorities said that human remains recovered from the crash site had been placed in nine body bags, but it was unclear from how many victims the remains had come.

Agus Haryono, an operations official with Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters Monday that police and military rescue divers had found part of what they believed was the fuselage and were search- ing for more at a depth of around 130 feet, as well as on the water’s surface.

“We have found pieces of fuselage and passengers’ property, such as ID cards,” Agus said. “There is a lot of debris.”

Danang Mandala Prihantoro, a Lion Air official, said in a statement that the air- craft was new and had been in service only since August.

“Lion Air is very con- cerned about this incident and will collaborate with relevant agencies and all par- ties,” Danang said.

Edward Sirait, Lion Air’s president director, said the same plane had experienced an unspecified technical problem during a flight on Sunday from Bali to Jakarta but that the issue had been resolved “according to procedure.”

FlightRadar24, a flight tracking service, said that it had analyzed preliminary satellite navigation data from the flight that showed an “increase in speed” and “high rate of descent” from the plane’s last transmission.

The data released by FlightRadar24 showed Monday’s flight taking off and initially ascending to what wou ld be a nor m al altitude. But within a couple of minutes, the plane suddenly plunged 500 feet and banked left in an unusual flight pattern. The plane then ascended and leveled off before what appears to have been a sharp descent into the Java Sea.

“The erratic flight path makes us suspect a problem with the pitot-static system,” said Gerry Soejatman, an Indonesian aviation expert, referring to the instruments used to record the flight’s airborne speed and altitude.

Soejatman said he had looked at the flight data from Sunday’s flight and noted a “similar erratic climb and groundspeed problem,” leading him to suspect a problem with the instruments had also been an issue then.

Several plane crashes have been blamed on blockages or other problems with pitot tubes, a probe on the outside of the aircraft, which resulted in erroneous speed or altitude readings, Soejatman said.

Soerjanto Thanjono, the chief of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, said at a news briefing Monday that the weather had been sunny and clear.