A passenger Boeing 737-500 took off from Jakarta airport, gained altitude, and disappeared over the sea. This is the picture painted by the FlightRadar24 flight tracking system website.
Flight SJ182 disappeared from radar shortly after takeoff. The aircraft dropped to over 10,000 feet in less than a minute before completely disappearing from the radar. The Boeing’s flight path ends off the coast north of Jakarta.
The signal for flight no. SJ182 was lost at 07:40:27. The flight was operated from Jakarta to Pontianak, the website reportd.
It is known that we are talking about a Boeing 737 of Sriwijaya Air. According to various sources, 50-100 people including children may have been on board the plane. A search and rescue operation has already begun.
What caused the crash?
The Boeing 737-524 crashed in Indonesia passed through a thunderstorm front during takeoff and found itself in a zone of strong turbulence. Dani Saptiadi, a representative of the Agency for Meteorology, Climate, and Geophysics, told reporters on Sunday.
According to the data received from satellites, at the time of take-off, there was a lot of cloudiness, heavy precipitation, and a thunderstorm within a radius of 15 km, the Detik portal quoted him as saying.
In addition, “all the aircraft that were in the area at that time should have experienced severe turbulence,” said a spokesman for the department.
The plane was torn into small fragments. Meanwhile, as Saptiadi noted, “the visibility was about 2 km, and this condition is suitable for takeoff or landing.”
Curio Aji, deputy head of the national search and rescue agency, said the ground services did not receive any emergency signals from any aircraft in their area of responsibility. Moreover, according to him, satellite systems of neighboring Australia also did not record any signals.
According to the aviation portal FlightRadar, during the first minutes after takeoff, the airliner was gaining altitude, but then, after a mark of 3.3 thousand meters, it dropped sharply by 3 thousand meters in less than a minute.