Indonesia said a search and rescue mission was underway on Saturday after air traffic control lost contact with a passenger plane just minutes after it took off from Jakarta.
There were 56 passengers and six crew members onboard the plane, which was not the 737 MAX model involved in two recent deadly crashes.
According to the FlightRadar24 tracker, Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182, said to be a Boeing 737-500, lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than one minute, approximately four minutes after it departed Soekarno–Hatta International Airport.
“A Sriwijaya [Air] plane from Jakarta to Pontianak [on Borneo island] with call sign SJY182 has lost contact,” said Indonesian Transport Ministry spokesman Adita Irawati. “It last made contact at 2:40 p.m.”
A plane flying from Jakarta to Pontianak would spend most of the flight over the Java Sea. There was still no sign of the missing plane as night fell.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation, with more than 260 million people, has been plagued by transportation accidents on land, sea and air because of overcrowding on ferries, aging infrastructure and poorly enforced safety.
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 on Thursday over claims it defrauded regulators overseeing the 737 MAX model, which was grounded worldwide following the two deadly crashes.
