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Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 from Jakarta to Pontianak in Indonesian Borneo lost contact at 2:40 p.m. West Indonesian time (2:40 a.m. ET) on Saturday.
Major General Bambang Suryo Aji of Basarnas, Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency, told reporters on Saturday that the plane is believed to have crashed between the islands of Laki and Lancang, in the Thousand Islands chain to the northwest. from the capital Jakarta. Basarnas is now conducting a search operation.
Three Lancang Island fishermen told CNN they heard an explosion and experienced a sudden large wave around the time the plane disappeared.
“I heard a very loud explosion. I thought it was a bomb or a big thunderbolt. Then we saw the big wave, about 2 meters high, hitting our boat,” Hendrik Mulyadi told CNN.
Hendrik’s colleague Solihin described the sound as “a bomb in water.” They said it was dark and raining at the time.
The men said they did not see a plane crash into the sea, but they smelled fuel and detected debris. The men said they returned to shore to report what they experienced to police.
Indonesia’s missing plane, a Boeing 737-500, was carrying 50 passengers, 43 adults and 7 children, as well as 12 crew members, Indonesian Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said during a press conference.
Indonesian news agency Antara reported on Sunday that the Jakarta Metropolitan Police have set up a command post at a hospital in east Jakarta for families to identify the bodies from the crash if recovered.
So far, the authorities have not yet reported the recovery of human remains during the search for the missing aircraft.
Rubble found near the island
In a joint effort between the Indonesian Navy, Police, Coast Guard and Ministry of Transport, a total of 28 ships, five helicopters and two aircraft are participating in the search, according to Rear Admiral Abdul Rasyid, including 10 ships from the Armada to be dispatched to the waters around Laki Island.
He previously said the Navy had deployed five warships and dive troops in the search.
An Indonesian Ministry of Transport coast guard captain said an emergency evacuation slide from a Boeing 737 was found at sea near the site where the accident is believed to have occurred.
Indonesian Sea and Coast Guard Captain Eko Suryo Hadi Prayitno previously told CNN that his team is still conducting search operations in the area between the Laki and Lancang Islands, which is approximately 20 miles from Jakarta.
Eko said they began searching the area at 7 p.m. local time (7 a.m. ET) and that 45 minutes later, they found the emergency exit of a plane, which he believes is from the missing plane.
He added that there are heavy rains and winds in the search area, and the crew was using night vision and radar in the search effort.
Earlier on Saturday, a senior Basarnas officer told reporters that officers on the ground had found debris around Lancang Island.
The debris will be passed on to the National Transportation Safety Committee for investigation, he said, adding that it is not confirmed whether the debris belongs to the missing plane.
Flight 182 lost contact 11 nautical miles north of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at an altitude of 11,000 feet while ascending to 13,000 feet. officials said.
Sriwijaya Airlines CEO Jefferson Irwin Jauwena said the plane was in good condition before taking off.
“Of course we are very concerned about what happened to us with the SJ 182,” he told a news conference on Saturday.
“We hope your prayers can help the search process go smoothly. We hope all is well,” said Jauwena.
In an earlier statement, Sriwijaya Air said that they were “in contact with various related parties for more detailed information” on the incident and that they will “immediately issue an official statement” when there is more clear information.
The Ministry of Transport said it is investigating and coordinating with Basarnas and the National Transportation Safety Committee.
The Boeing 737-500, registered PK CLC, is 26 years old, according to Flightradar24.
A Boeing spokesperson told CNN in a statement that they are “aware of media reports from Jakarta and are closely monitoring the situation.”
“We are working to collect more information,” they said.
Sriwijaya Air, a low-cost carrier and Indonesia’s third-largest airline, carries more than 950,000 passengers per month from its central Jakarta to 53 destinations within Indonesia and three regional countries, according to the company’s website.
In June 2018, it was removed from the European Union’s list of banned airlines, 11 years after its inclusion on that list.
The incident is the latest to shake the Indonesian airline industry, a sector that, while growing, continues to be plagued by notoriously poor safety standards.
A troubling record
In 2014, Indonesia’s AirAsia Flight 8501 claimed the lives of 162 people on board after crashing into the Java Sea while flying from Surabaya to Singapore.
And in the year before that, Lion Air was involved in two accidents. A Boeing 737 lost the runway on landing and crashed into the sea near Bali, forcing passengers to swim or wade to safety, while another Boeing 737 collided with a cow while landing at Jalaluddin Airport in Gorontalo. on the island of Sulawesi.
In 2007, the European Union banned all 51 Indonesian airlines from its airspace after a Garuda Indonesia plane with 140 people on board left the Yogyakarta runway in March and burst into flames, killing 21 people in board.
Indonesia, an archipelago nation of more than 13,000 islands, has seen a boom in domestic aviation in recent years, with passenger traffic tripling between 2005 and 2017, according to Australian consultancy CAPA-Center for Aviation.
The country of 270 million people relies heavily on air travel to travel between the islands of the archipelago, which stretches for more than 3,000 miles – roughly the same distance between London and New York.
Jamaluddin Masrur reported from Jakarta. CNN’s Mohammed Tawfeeq contributed to this report.
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