(TAN): A Sriwijaya Air plane carrying 50 passengers and six crew is feared to have crashed shortly after taking off from Jakarta on January 9. However, at the time of the filing of this report, the airline had not confirmed the crash but said the aircraft had lost contact. Six other crew were also travelling on the aircraft as passengers.
“We confirm that flight SJ-182 from Jakarta to Pontianak lost contact today, January 9, at 1440 WB,” the airline said in a statement in Indonesian on Twitter.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 said: “Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182 crashed shortly after take off from Jakarta on 9 January 2021. The flight, operated by 737-500 registered PK-CLC, departed at 07:36 UTC (14:36 local time). The last ADS-B signal from the aircraft was received by Flightradar24 at 07:40 UTC.”
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“SJ182 took off at 07:36 UTC and climbed to a maximum altitude of 10,900 feet at 07:40:06. The aircraft then began a steep descent and the last received data from the aircraft is 250 feet at 07:40:27,” it said.
Boeing, the manufacturer of the missing aircraft, said it was “closely monitoring the situation”.
The news comes at a bad time for the plane manufacturer, which was just beginning to recover from the repercussions of its 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019; and the aviation industry at large, which is only starting to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 crisis.
