|
Indonesia's
Sriwijaya Air plane feared to have crashed after taking off from Jakarta
Jakarta, Indonesia
(CNN)A Sriwijaya Air plane carrying 62 people on board is feared to have
crashed shortly after taking off from Jakarta, according to Indonesia's
Head Of National Transportation Safety Committee, Suryanto Cahyono.
Sriwijaya Air flight
182 from Jakarta to Pontianak, in Indonesian Borneo, lost contact at 2:40
p.m. Western Indonesian Time (2:40 a.m. ET) on Saturday.
Maj. Gen Bambang
Suryo Aji of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, Basarnas, told reporters
on Saturday that the plane is believed to have crashed between the islands
of Laki and Lancang, in the Thousand Islands chain northwest of the
capital, Jakarta. Basarnas is now conducting a search operation.
The missing
Indonesia plane was carrying 50 passengers -- 43 adults and 7 children --
as well as 12 crew members, Indonesia's Minister of Transportation Budi
Karya Sumadi said during a press conference.
The Indonesian Navy
has deployed five warships and diving troops in the search, according to
Rear Admiral Abdul Rasyid.
Earlier on Saturday,
a high-ranking Basarnas officer told reporters their officers on the ground
had found debris around Lancang Island.
The debris will be
passed to the National Transportation Safety Committee to be investigated,
he said, adding that is not confirmed if that 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 climbing to 13,000 feet,
officials said.
The plane dropped
10,000 feet in less than a minute before disappearing from the radar,
according to the global flight tracking service Flightradar24. The drop
happened about four minutes after takeoff, it said.
Sriwijaya Airlines
CEO Jefferson Irwin Jauwena said the plane was in good condition before it
took off.
"Of course we
are very concerned about what happened to us with SJ 182," he said at
a press conference on Saturday.
"We hope that
your prayers can help the search process run smoothly. We hope all is
well," Jauwena said.
In an earlier
statement, Sriwijaya Air said that they were "in contact with various
related parties to get more detailed information" regarding the incident
and that they will "immediately issue an official statement" when
more information was clear.
The Transport
Ministry said it is investigating and coordinating with Basarnas and the
National Committee for Transport Safety.
The plane,
registered PK CLC, is a Boeing 737-500. The aircraft 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 gather more information," they said.
Sriwijaya Air, a
low-cost airline and Indonesia's third largest carrier, transports more
than 950,000 passengers per month from its Jakarta hub 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 air carriers, 11 years
after it was placed on that list.
The incident is the
latest to rock Indonesia's airline industry, a sector that, while growing,
continues to be plagued by notoriously poor safety standards.
A worrying record
In October 2018,
Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea in Indonesia after taking off
from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. The Boeing 737 Max 8 plane
was scheduled to make a one-hour journey to Pangkal Pinang on the island of
Bangka.
The improper design
and certification of the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, coupled with an
overwhelmed flight crew battling a malfunctioning system they could not
properly identify, led to the crash, according to an October 2019 report by
Indonesian authorities.
In 2014, Indonesian
AirAsia Flight 8501 claimed the lives of all 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 missed
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 touching down 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 overshot the runway in
Yogyakarta in March and burst into flames, killing 21 people on board.
Standards have since
improved, with all Indonesian airlines cleared from that blacklist by June
2018.
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 the CAPA-Center for Aviation.
The country of 270
million people rely heavily on air transport to commute between islands
across the archipelago, which stretches over more than 3,000 miles, around
the same distance between London and New York.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/09/asia/indonesia-sriwijaya-air-plane-intl/index.html
|
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar
Merk: Bare medlemmer av denne bloggen kan legge inn en kommentar.