Jakarta Airport Sets up Crisis Center for Missing for Sriwijaya Air Flight 182

Indonesian authorities are searching for a 26-year-old Boeing Co. jet with 62 people on board that lost radio contact shortly after taking off from the capital Jakarta, pushing the nation’s aviation industry into crisis mode once again.

The country’s search agency picked up some debris in the Java Sea “strongly suspected” to belong to the Sriwijaya Air Flight SJ182, it said in a statement, similar to those circulating earlier in the social media.

Heavy rain in Jakarta had delayed the takeoff for the 90-minute trip to Pontianak on the island of Borneo. About three minutes after lifting off, it leveled off at an altitude of about 10,000 to 11,000 feet for almost a minute before a rapid descent to the water in just 14 seconds, according to Flightradar24’s tracking data. That meant it was dropping at more than 40,000 feet per minute, a rate far above routine operations.

Without access yet to the plane’s black-box flight recorders, it’s impossible to say what may have triggered the sudden dive, said Jeffrey Guzzetti, the former head of accident investigations at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

“Right now, given the amount of sparse information, that flight track could fit many scenarios, such as flight crew confusion, instrumentation problems, catastrophic mechanical failures or even an intentional act,” Guzzetti said.

The Southeast Asian nation 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 before the global grounding. In December 2014, an AirAsia Group Bhd. plane plunged into the Java Sea with 162 people on board. Weather has been a contributing factor in several of the crashes.

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

“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,” Richard Aboulafia, aviation analyst at Teal Group Corp. said by phone. “Thousands of these planes have been built and production ended over 20 years ago, so something would have been discovered by now.”

The jet’s disappearance comes as the aviation industry is reeling from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which brought air travel to its knees. Covid-19 tore through in a tumultuous, unprecedented way -- leaving carriers in a deep hole, along with a constellation of aerospace manufacturers, airports and leasing firms. The International Air Transport Association said last week that global passenger demand dropped significantly during November, down 70% versus the same period of 2019 when measured in revenue passenger kilometers.

“While we don’t know anything else about the cause of this crash, the biggest thing concerning me is serious concerns about Indonesian air safety standards that were identified by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and others years ago,” Aboulafia said. “I am not completely certain that the proper procedures have been put in place.”

Indonesian authorities said they have sent several search vessels from Jakarta to the plane’s last known location in the Java Sea, believed to be only around 25 meters deep, and divers are preparing to search for the aircraft’s black box. First responders were also deployed to the site to aid potential survivors, local TV reported. Of the 62 people, 56 were passengers, including seven children and three infants, and there were two pilots and four cabin crew, local media reported. There were no foreign nationals onboard.

“We are aware of media reports from Jakarta, and are closely monitoring the situation,” Boeing spokeswoman Zoe Leong said in a statement. “We are working to gather more information.” Sriwijaya Air said it’s working to obtain more detailed information about the flight, and will release an official statement later.

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