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A Sriwijaya Air passenger plane carrying 62 people lost contact with air traffic controllers on Saturday (local time), minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital on a domestic flight, authorities said.
Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said flight SJ182 was delayed for an hour before taking off at 2:36 pm. The Boeing 737-500 disappeared from radar four minutes later, after the pilot contacted air traffic control to ascend to an altitude of 29,000 feet, he said.
The airline said in a statement that the plane was on an estimated 90-minute flight from Jakarta to Pontianak, the capital of the West Kalimantan province on the Indonesian island of Borneo. There were 56 passengers and six crew on board.
AP Photo / Helmansyah
Family members are now anxiously awaiting news about what happened to their relatives.
Sumadi said a dozen ships, including four warships, were deployed in a search and rescue operation centered between Lancang Island and Laki Island, part of the Thousand Islands chain north of Jakarta.
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Local media reports said fishermen saw metal objects believed to be parts of a plane Saturday afternoon in the Thousand Islands.
Television footage showed family members and friends of people on board the plane crying, praying and hugging as they waited at the Jakarta and Pontianak airports.
AP Photo / Tatan Syuflana
Indonesian soldiers are near a crisis center established after the plane went missing.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation with more than 260 million people, has been hit by transportation accidents on land, sea and air due to overcrowded ferries, outdated infrastructure and poor safety regulations.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Lion Air sank in the Java Sea just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
The aircraft involved in Saturday’s incident did not have the automated flight control system that played a role in the Lion Air crash and another 737 MAX 8 crash in Ethiopia five months later, leading to the grounding of the MAX 8 for 20 months. .
AP Photo / Helmansyah
Families await news as authorities launch a search and rescue operation.
The Lion Air accident was the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since 1997, when 234 people were killed on a Garuda airline flight near Medan on the island of Sumatra.
In December 2014, an AirAsia flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore sank into the sea, killing 162 people.
Sriwijaya Air is one of Indonesia’s discount airlines, flying to dozens of domestic and international destinations.
FLIGHTRADAR24
The flight lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than a minute, according to FlightRadar24.
