A passenger jet carrying more than 60 people crashed into the Java Sea on Saturday, minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Indonesian officials said, bringing renewed attention to a nation long cursed by aviation disasters.
Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 from Jakarta to Pontianak, in Indonesian Borneo, lost contact at 2:40 p.m. Western Indonesian Time (2:40 a.m. ET) on Saturday.
Maj. Gen Bambang Suryo Aji of Basarnas, Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency, told reporters on Saturday that the plane is believed to have crashed between the islands of Laki and Lancang, in the Thousand Islands chain northwest of the capital, Jakarta. Basarnas is now conducting a search operation.
On Sunday morning, the Jakarta police said that body parts and some clothes from the passengers had been found in waters just northwest of the Indonesian capital. The area where the remains and debris were discovered is known as the Thousand Islands.
Indonesian divers also located parts of the wreckage of a Boeing 737-500 in the Java Sea as rescuers pulled out body parts, pieces of clothing and scraps of metal from the waters where the Siriwijaya Air flight SJ182 crashed.
The Indonesian authorities urged close family members to provide DNA samples or dental and medical records of the passengers to speed up the identification process of the remains.
Boeing acknowledged Saturday’s crash, saying on Twitter: “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.” CFM International, which manufactured the plane’s engines, said in a statement that it was providing technical assistance to the Indonesian authorities and to Sriwijaya Air.
The aviation sector in Indonesia, a developing country of thousands of inhabited islands, has been plagued by crashes and safety lapses for years. Indonesia’s aviation record is one of the worst in Asia, with more civilian airliner passenger accidents since 1945 than any other country in the region.
As Indonesian airlines, particularly low-cost carriers, have grown rapidly to cover a vast archipelago, the domestic aviation industry has been undermined by shoddy aircraft maintenance and cavalier adherence to safety standards.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet operated by Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
It was the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since 1997, when 234 people were killed on a Garuda flight near Medan on Sumatra island.
