Indonesia loses contact by plane over the Java Sea

The Indonesian Ministry of Transport said on Saturday that it lost contact with a passenger plane after taking off from the capital, Jakarta, and flying over the Java Sea.

The ministry said the last contact with the plane, Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, was made at 2:40 pm local time. The Boeing 737-524 was bound for Pontianak, on the island of Borneo. There were 62 people on board, according to an official from Sriwijaya Air, a Jakarta-based Indonesian airline.

Four minutes after taking off in heavy rain, the 26-year-old lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than 60 seconds, according to flight tracking service Flightradar24.

The aviation sector has long been in Indonesia, a developing country with thousands of islands Plagued with troubles, And dealing with poor safety records and rapid growth of budget airlines.

In 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 It crashed into the Java Sea with 189 people on board after the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft’s immobilizer system, designed by Boeing, failed. Another 737 MAX crashed in Ethiopia in March 2019 after a similar wrongful activation of the anti-rollover system, resulting in the Worldwide grounding for the entire Max fleet For nearly two years.

Regarding Saturday’s flight, Sriwijaya Airlines said in a preliminary statement that “the administration is still communicating and investigating this matter and will immediately issue an official statement after obtaining the actual information.”

The country’s aviation safety committee said it was on alert and that the transport minister had gone to the international airport in Jakarta. Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency said the patrol boats were heading to waters northwest of Jakarta, where the plane was last seen.

“Whenever we hear this kind of news, we prepare,” said Oni Suryu Wibowo, an investigator with the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Commission, on Saturday. “We are collecting all the information that we can obtain.”