Indonesia: Sriwijaya Air plane crashes in Java Sea.
A Sriwijaya Air plane carrying more than 60 people crashed into the Java Sea on Saturday, minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Indonesian authorities said.
See also: Serious incident reported with two planes over Caribbean Sea.
The Indonesian Ministry of Transport reported that the last contact with the plane, Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, was made at 2:40 p.m. local time.
The Boeing 737-500 was headed for the city of Pontianak on the island of Borneo. The plane had 62 people on board, according to an airline official, reported The New York Time.
See also: A pyrotechnics balloon got entangled in Avianca’s plane in El Dorado.
Four minutes after taking off in a heavy rain, the 26-year-old plane lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude, according to Flightradar24, the flight tracking service.
Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said it had found pieces of debris in the waters northwest of Jakarta that it believed might be from the plane’s wreckage, but said darkness had prevented its search.
Sriwijaya Air, which is Indonesia’s third largest airline and began operations in 2003, had never had a fatal accident before.
The aviation sector in Indonesia, a developing country with thousands of islands, has long been plagued by problems due to poor safety performance and the rapid growth of low-cost airlines.
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