Photo: Ed Wray/Getty Images
Reading Time: < 1 minuteOn Sunday, January 10, an Indonesian jetliner Sriwijaya Air, with 62 people on board, crashed into the Java Sea minutes after its takeoff.
The last contact with the crew of the SJY182 flight was at 2:40 p.m. local time, 11 nautical miles north of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. As we can trace it from the global flight tracking service Flightradar24, the aircraft that should have been heading from Jakarta to Pontiak dropped 10,000 feet in less than a minute before disappearing from the radar. Strangely enough, according to the head of national search and rescue agency Air Marshal Bagus Puruhito, the aircraft did not send a distress signal.
For now, it has not been established what caused the crash. Officials say that “black boxes” have been located along with some wreckage: a part of the plane’s fuselage, the wheel, and a turbine. Several witnesses claimed to have seen or heard “at least one explosion” around the time when the airliner disappeared from the radar.
Among the findings, there are also body parts leaving no hope to find any survivors. Police have asked the victims’ families to provide DNA samples and dental medical records to help with the identification process.
Boeing expressed its condolences: “Our thoughts are with the crew, passengers, and their families. We are in contact with our airline customers and stand ready to support them during this difficult time.”
The disaster involved a 26-year-old Boeing 737-500, a model developed in the 1980s without the new technology, not the troubled 737 Max type aircraft.