An Indonesian budget airline jet is suspected to have crashed into the sea just minutes after the Boeing 737 lost contact with air traffic control on Saturday, the country’s national search and rescue agency said.
The transport minister of the country said that 62 passengers and crew boarded the plane.
‘We deployed our team, boats and sea riders to the location suspected to be where it went down after losing contact,’ Bambang Suryo Aji, a senior official at the agency, told reporters.
The suspected crash site is near tourist islands just off the coast of Indonesia’s sprawling capital Jakarta.
Sriwijaya Air’s jet lost contact about four minutes after leaving Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta international airport on its way to Borneo island.
‘A Sriwijaya Air plane from Jakarta to Pontianak on Borneo island with call sign SJY182 has lost contact,’ said ministry spokesman Adita Irawati.
‘It last made contact at 2:40pm, 07:40 GMT.’
It was unclear how many passengers and crew were aboard the Boeing 737-500, which has a capacity of about 130, when it took off from Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta international airport.
The usual flight time is about 90-minutes.
The budget airline said only it was investigating the incident.
Indonesia’s search and rescue agency and the National Transportation Safety Commission were also investigating, Irawati said.
In October 2018, 189 people were killed when a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX jet slammed into the Java Sea about 12 minutes after take-off from Jakarta on a routine one-hour flight.
That crash—and a subsequent fatal flight in Ethiopia—saw Boeing hit with $2.5 billion in fines over claims it defrauded regulators overseeing the 737 MAX model, which was grounded worldwide following the two deadly crashes.