Indonesia locates crash site, plane's black boxes

Jakarta

AN Indonesian search-and-rescue team located the crash site where a Boeing jet carrying 62 people operated by Sriwijaya Air went down just minutes after takeoff on Saturday, with the authorities saying that they expect to retrieve the aircraft's black boxes soon.

Debris suspected to be from Flight SJ182 has been found along with emergency signals transmitted by two devices, with the search team already locating both flight recorders, according to officials.

The search will continue through the night with the team expecting to recover the black boxes soon.

''We believe that it is the location of the crash,'' military chief Hadi Tjahjanto said in a televised briefing. Items found 23 metres underwater include life vests and parts of the aircraft that bear its registration number, he said.

Confirmation that the plane had crashed came about 20 hours after it went missing following its departure from capital Jakarta, and Indonesian President Joko Widodo called for maximum effort to search for and rescue the victims.

While the cause hasn't been determined, the accident has once again pushed the country's aviation industry into crisis mode.

Indonesia has had a spate of plane crashes in the past decade, including the Lion Air Flight 610 disaster that killed 189 people in 2018, the first of the two 737 Max crashes that led to a global grounding.

In December 2014, an AirAsia Group plane plunged into the Java Sea with 162 people on board.

The plane that Sriwijaya Air was flying is a 737-500 model that's much older than the 737 Max aircraft.

Weather has been a contributing factor in several of the past crashes. On Saturday, heavy rain in Jakarta delayed the takeoff for the 90-minute SJ182 flight to Pontianak on the island of Borneo.

It finally took off at 2.36 pm local time, reaching 1,700 feet a minute later, where it was cleared by Jakarta air traffic controllers to ascend to 29,000 feet, according to Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi. Four minutes after takeoff, controllers noticed that the aircraft was not on its assigned track. They radioed the crew, and within seconds, the aircraft disappeared from radar, he said.

Flightradar24's tracking data showed the plane levelling off at an altitude of about 10,000-11,000 feet three minutes after taking off, before a rapid descent to the water in just 14 seconds. That meant it was dropping at more than 40,000 feet per minute, a rate far above routine operations.

Indonesia deployed divers, warships, vessels with sonar and airplanes on Sunday. Of the 62 people, 50 were passengers, including seven children and three infants, and there were two pilots, four cabin crew and six off-duty crew, local media reported. There were no foreign nationals on board.

Boeing is ''closely monitoring the situation'', spokesperson Zoe Leong said in a statement. ''We are working to gather more information.''

Sriwijaya Air said it will work with relevant authorities in evacuation and investigation efforts.

The 737-500 model first flew in 1989 and, according to tracking website Planespotters.net, this particular plane first flew in May 1994.

''This is not even the model before the Max, it has been in service for 30 years so it's unlikely to be a design fault,'' said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at Teal Group Corp. ''Thousands of these planes have been built and production ended over 20 years ago, so something would have been discovered by now.''

Indonesia, which had one of the fastest-growing airline industries in the world prior to Covid-19, has a patchy safety record when it comes to air accidents.

Its poor aviation history saw carriers from the nation banned from the European Union in 2007 and it was only in June 2018 that the full ban was lifted. BLOOMBERG