189 feared dead after Indonesia plane plunges into sea
An Indonesian air liner has crashed into the sea just minutes after taking off from Jakarta with 189 people on board, reports Reuters.
Fears for passengers and crew aboard the Lion Air Boeing 737 jet were growing as search-and-rescue workers attempted to sift through wreckage in waters up to 35m deep.
Indonesia’s disaster agency posted photos online of a crushed smartphone, books, bags and parts of the aircraft fuselage that had been collected by teams that converged on the area. Television pictures showed a fuel slick and a field of debris.
Low-cost airline Lion Air said the brand-new aircraft, on a short-haul flight to Pangkal Pinang near Sumatra, was carrying 181 passengers, including one child and two babies, and eight crew members.
Friends and relatives of those on board prayed and hugged each other as they waited at Pangkal Pinang’s airport, while at the National Search and Rescue Agency headquarters in Jakarta, family members turned up, hoping desperately for news.
Some 20 Indonesian officials were on the flight and the country’s finance minister, Sri Mulyani, also arrived at the agency’s offices to question staff.
About 300 people including police officers, fishermen and soldiers are involved in the search and officials said they had not yet recovered any bodies - only ID cards, personal belongings and aircraft debris.
“We don’t know yet whether there are any survivors,” rescue agency chief Muhmmad Syaugi told reporters, adding that no distress signal had been received from the aircraft’s emergency transmitter.
Lion Air’s president-director Edward Sirait said the jet had had a “technical problem” during its previous flight from Bali to Jakarta but that the problem had been fully repaired.
Boeing spokesman Paul Lewis said the aerospace firm was “closely monitoring the situation” but did not provide details on the aircraft in question, a 737 Max 8 which was delivered in August and began flying within days.
The jet took off at 6.20am and crashed a mere 13 minutes later, transport ministry officials said. According to publicly available flight data, the first clue that something was wrong came just two minutes into the flight when the 737 reached 2,000ft altitude.
It dropped more than 500ft and veered to port before climbing again. Data was lost at 3,650ft.
The pilots had asked to turn back to base shortly before losing contact with air traffic control, according to a spokesman for Indonesia’s air navigation authorities.
Investigators will attempt to recover the craft’s so-called black boxes - secure devices that record flight data and voices in the cockpit.
Kamil Ridwan, the governor of West Java, said on Twitter that he hoped the search and rescue operation would proceed “quickly and smoothly”, adding: “Hopefully the families of the passengers who get this disaster can be given fortitude & patience for this accident.”
