An Indonesian passenger plane with 189 people on board crashed into the Java Sea Monday morning shortly after it took off from an airport in the capital city of Jakarta. Authorities do not expect to find survivors.
The incident will surely raise questions about the airline involved, Lion Air, as well as the aircraft, a Boeing 787 MAX 8.
Here’s what we know about the incident.
What do we know about the crash so far?
Lion Air flight JT610 took off around 6:20 a.m. local time and was set to travel north from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, a city on the Indonesian island of Bangka. It crashed into the sea just 13 minutes after takeoff.
Shortly after takeoff, the pilot of flight JT610 requested permission from air traffic controllers to turn back to Jakarta’s Soekarno–Hatta International Airport. But the pilot did not indicate there was an emergency on board, an air traffic agency spokesman told CNN. However, pilots are trained to focus predominantly on flying their aircraft in emergency situations, with communication a secondary priority.
Lion Air CEO Edward Sirait told reporters that the plane experienced a “technical issue” on a previous flight Sunday night, but the problem had been “resolved according to procedure.”
Lion Air said in a statement that the plane’s pilot-in-command had logged more than 6,000 flight hours before the incident, while the co-pilot had logged more than 5,000 flight hours.
With 189 people on board, including passengers and crew, flight JT610 stands to become Indonesia’s worst aviation disaster since 1997. Indonesia’s finance ministry said 20 of the passengers on board were government officials.
What is Lion Air?
Lion Air is a low-cost air carrier based in Indonesia and established in 1999.
Concerns have previously been raised over Lion Air’s safety record. In 2004, 25 people died when a Lion Air plane crashed during a landing attempt in the city of Surakarta. In 2007, Lion Air was banned from flying in the European Union, along with all other Indonesian airlines, over a series of deadly accidents that followed a period of industry deregulation in the 1990’s. In 2013, 101 people survived a Lion Air crash in the sea off Bali and swam from the plane.
Lion Air now operates in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Middle East.
It was exempted from the EU ban in 2016 after new safety assessments were conducted.
What kind of plane was involved?
Flight JT610 appears to mark the first deadly incident involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8, a single-aisle commercial jet that came into service in 2017. Many aviation experts and airlines consider it the future of short-haul air travel, largely thanks to its fuel efficiency. 4,783 orders have been placed for the 737 MAX, with 219 delivered so far.
Lion Air was one of the Boeing 737 MAX 8’s best customers, with 11 in its fleet already. The specific plane that crashed Monday had been in use for just two months.
How is the search going?
A 250-person team is searching the area where the plane went down. But it has yet to locate the main crash site, Bambang Suryo, operational director of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters. “I predict there are no survivors, based on body parts found so far,” he said.
The head of Indonesia’s disaster agency tweeted images of a cell phone and plane debris discovered near where the site of the crash. Investigators are focused on recovering the plane’s so-called “black box,” which is designed to record cockpit voice audio and flight data that could prove invaluable in determining what happened aboard flight JT610.
Speaking at a press conference early Monday, Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, urged Indonesians to “keep on praying.”
