Indonesia Plane Crash Adds to Country’s Troubling Safety Record
By Muktita Suhartono and Hannah Beech
JAKARTA, Indonesia — A plane carrying 189 people from Jakarta to a smaller Indonesian city crashed into the Java Sea on Monday, prompting hard questions about the safety of the skies over a vast island nation dependent on air travel.
Minutes after takeoff, with skies clear and piloting a brand-new plane, the crew of Lion Air Flight 610 contacted air traffic controllers and asked permission to return to the airport.
“The request was permitted,” said a spokesman for the Indonesian air navigation authorities, Yohanes Sirait. “Then we lost contact. It was very quick, maybe around one minute.”
A tugboat crew saw the plane crash in Karawang Bay, northeast of Jakarta, the National Search and Rescue Agency said. Witnesses who saw the plane hurtle into the sea told the authorities they had not heard an explosion.
Officials appeared to have given up any hope of survivors.
“I suspect all the passengers are dead,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Bambang Suryo, director of operations for the search and rescue agency.
By airplane standards, the Boeing 737 Max 8 that crashed was brand new. It was delivered to Lion Air in August and had flown only about 800 total hours before it went down.
“The Max 8 was one of the Boeing’s fastest-selling entry airplanes,” said Robert W. Mann, an airline consultant based in Port Washington, N.Y. “There are thousands of them on order.”
A new class of aircraft, the plane entered service only about 17 months ago but has quickly become an airline mainstay as carriers like Southwest and American Airlines add them to their fleets. They generally replace older 737s, which fly mostly domestic routes.
Edward Sirait, Lion Air’s president director, said the plane that crashed on Monday had experienced an unspecified technical problem during a flight the day before from the Indonesian resort island of Bali to Jakarta. He said the issue had been resolved “according to procedure.”
For Indonesia, the crash was another setback for its fast-growing aviation sector, which has been troubled for years by safety problems but had recently shown signs of progress. In June, the European Union lifted a ban on Indonesian airlines that it had imposed in 2007, citing “unaddressed safety concerns.” (The state carrier, Garuda, and three other airlines were cleared in 2009.)
In the hours after the crash Monday, a team of 30 divers was searching for the plane’s black boxes, critical pieces of evidence for determining the cause of the crash, Air Marshal Muhammad Syaugi, chief of the search and rescue agency, said. Officials said rescue workers had arrived at the crash site, two nautical miles south of the aircraft’s last reported coordinates.
The plane departed Jakarta, the capital, at 6:21 a.m. Monday. The aviation website Flight Tracker said the flight had been scheduled to arrive at 7:20 a.m. in Pangkal Pinang, on an island off Sumatra.
The 178 passengers included two infants, one other child, 20 officials from the country’s Ministry of Finance and 10 more from the state auditor agency, officials said. An Indian pilot was among the eight crew members, and an Italian passenger was also onboard.
By Monday night, the authorities said that human remains recovered from the crash site had been placed in nine body bags, but it was unclear from how many victims the remains came from. Mr. Syaugi said he believed that many of the bodies were still trapped in the plane.
Agus Haryono, an operations official with Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters that police and military rescue divers had found part of what they believed was the fuselage and were searching for more at a depth of around 130 feet, as well as on the water’s surface.
“We have found pieces of fuselage and passengers’ property, such as I.D. cards,” Mr. Agus said. “There is a lot of debris.”
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster relief agency, posted photographs on Twitter of material from the flight being recovered, including mobile phones and bags.
Danang Mandala Prihantoro, a Lion Air official, said in a statement that the aircraft had been in service only since August. “Lion Air is very concerned about this incident and will collaborate with relevant agencies and all parties,” Mr. Danang said. The airline, he said, had set up hotlines for the relatives of passengers to call for information.
The cause of the crash was not clear.
FlightRadar24, a flight tracking service, said that it had analyzed preliminary satellite navigation data from the flight that showed an “increase in speed” and “high rate of descent” from the plane’s last transmission.
The data released by FlightRadar24 showed Monday’s flight taking off and initially ascending to what would be a normal altitude. But within a couple of minutes, the plane suddenly plunged 500 feet and banked left in an unusual flight pattern. The plane then ascended and leveled off before what appears to have been a sharp descent into the Java Sea.
“The erratic flight path makes us suspect a problem with the pitot-static system,” said Gerry Soejatman, an Indonesian aviation expert, referring to the instruments used to record the flight’s airborne speed and altitude.
Mr. Soejatman said he had looked at the flight data from Sunday’s flight and noted a “similar erratic climb and groundspeed problem,” leading him to suspect a problem with the instruments had also been an issue then.
Several plane crashes have been blamed on blockages or other problems with pitot tubes, a probe on the outside of the aircraft, which resulted in erroneous speed or altitude readings, Mr. Soejatman said.
Conchita Caroline, a television presenter who was on Sunday’s flight from Bali to Jakarta, said the beginning of the journey was marred by irregularities. As the plane readied for takeoff, the engine seemed to die several times, she said.
For about half an hour, the passengers were kept on the plane at the Bali airport with no explanation, even as a lack of electricity made the interior hot and stuffy, she said, causing children to cry and some older passengers to vomit.
“The passengers were all confused,” Ms. Caroline said. “We had no idea what was going on.”
The plane eventually took off, but Ms. Caroline said that the air conditioner did not work well during the flight and that the floor under her feet felt hot to the touch. The right engine, which she could see from her window, was shaking, she said.
“I don’t really understand about airplane engines,” she said, “but I have never experienced this kind of thing before.”
Soerjanto Thanjono, the chief of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, said at a news briefing on Monday that the weather had been sunny and clear.
After the plane took off, the wind speed was only five knots between the altitudes of 10,000 and 24,000 feet, said Dwikorita Karnawati, the head of the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics.
Boeing said in a statement that it was “deeply saddened” and stood ready to assist investigators. “We express our concern for those on board, and extend heartfelt sympathies to their families and loved ones,” it said.
Lion Air said in a statement on Monday that the captain of the flight, Capt. Bhavye Suneja, an Indian citizen, had more than 6,000 flying hours and that the co-pilot, who goes by the single name of Harvino, had more than 5,000 flying hours.
Air travel is an especially convenient way to move around Indonesia, an archipelago nation of more than 13,000 islands and the world’s fourth most populous.
Passenger traffic in the country tripled from 2005 to 2017, to nearly 97 million, according to the CAPA-Center for Aviation, a consultancy based in Australia. As of last year, Lion Air, a budget carrier, controlled 51 percent of the domestic market.
But along with that rapid growth, which has made Indonesia the world’s fifth largest domestic aviation market, the country’s airline industry has had a troubled safety record.
Notably, in 2014, AirAsia Flight 8501 crashed on the way to Singapore from the Indonesian city of Surabaya. All seven crew and 155 passengers were killed.
Monday’s crash was the latest of at least 15 episodes involving Lion Air since it began operations in 2000.
In 2004, a Lion Air flight from Jakarta to Surabaya hydroplaned, overshot the runway and crashed into a cemetery as it stopped in the city of Surakarta, also known as Solo. The crash killed 25 people on board.
And in 2013, a Lion Air plane missed a runway and crashed into the ocean off, forcing passengers to swim ashore.
That accident, in which no one died, came a month after the airline announced a $24 billion order for 234 Airbus planes, the largest such deal in Airbus’s history.
Four Lion Air pilots were arrested in separate incidents in 2011 and 2012 for the possession of drugs, including ecstasy and crystal methamphetamine.
On Monday, the Australian government ordered its officials and contractors to avoid Lion Air at least until the cause of the latest crash was established.
Nevertheless, the United States Federal Aviation Administration restored Indonesia to its Category 1 safety rating in 2016, nearly a decade after lowering it to Category 2. The latter category indicates that a country lacks either laws that allow it to comply with minimum international standards, or technical expertise, trained personnel or various other procedures.
The fact that Lion Air is a budget airline does not necessarily mean its safety record is compromised, airline experts said.
“To generally say that all low-cost carriers are inherently less safe than other carriers is not instinctively true,” said Hasan Soedjono, an Indonesian aviation analyst. “Some accidents have nothing to do with low-cost carriers.”
Muktita Suhartono reported from Jakarta, and Hannah Beech from Bangkok. Mike Ives contributed reporting from Hong Kong, Joe Cochrane from Jakarta and Zach Wichter from New York.
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