A Lion Air plane parked at Denpasar airport. Thomas White/REUTERS
*Update 5:52 PM: Indonesian officials expect no survivors from the plane crash based on the body parts found at the site so far.A passenger plane flying from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, on the island of Bangka, went missing shortly after take-off on Monday morning local time, October 29. It departed Jakarta around 6am local time and lost contact soon after at 6:50.The Boeing-737 plane was scheduled to arrive in Bangka, an island the eastern coast of Sumatra, at 7:20 am and was carrying 189 people including 178 adult passengers, a child and two babies, according to Soerjanto Tjahjono, the Head of the National Transportation Safety Committee. Five crew members and two pilots were also on board.Preliminary data from FlightAware shows that Flight JT-610 rapidly increased in speed and decreased altitude off the coast of Jakarta. It's unknown what caused the flight to go down at this time, but air navigation officials told the Guardian that the pilot requested to return to Jakarta, turning the plane around, moments before they lost contact.The aircraft is said to have been delivered to Lion Air just two months ago, in August of this year.The plane is believed to have gone down in the waters off the coast of Tanjung Pakis, in Karawang, West Java, only a short distance from Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. Search and rescue teams arrived at the location Monday morning to find debris, including government ID cards and small bags, floating on the surface.Lion Air, a local low-cost carrier, has been involved in multiple accidents as well, but none as bad as this crash.In 2013, a Lion Air flight overshot the runway on the island of Bali and crashed into the sea, splitting its fuselage in two. There were 108 people on board at the time. No one was killed, but several sustained injuries.More recently, in August of last year, a Lion Air plane collided with one owned by Wings Air while taxing on the runway of Medan's Kualanamu International Airport.Stay tuned for more updates on this story.Last updated: 12:45 pm, on Monday, Oct. 29, 2018
Advertisement
These reports, which were first made public at a 10 am local time, press conference, confirm earlier claims of debris sightings by a tugboat operation in the same area. The state-owned oil and gas company Pertamina, which operates an offshore facility nearby, reported seeing the wreckage of a plane, including its seats, in the water. Here are the first photos and videos of the debris.The position of the plane itself has yet to be identified as of publication time. Search and rescue operations are underway. The waters at the crash site can be as deep as 35 meters at some points.Indonesia is notorious for its poor aviation safety record and has seen its fair share of frequent plane crashes—the worst of which were the crash of the Singapore-bound AirAsia flight QZ8501 in 2014 that left 162 dead and a military aircraft that went down in a residential neighborhood with more than 120 people on board in 2015, killing more than 140, including 22 on the ground.
Advertisement
