A Sriwijaya Air passenger jet with 62 people aboard appears to have plunged out of the air after losing contact with air traffic controllers shortly after taking off from Indonesia’s capital on Saturday.
A search and rescue operation is underway, but there was no sign of the missing plane as darkness fell.
Tracking service Flightradar24 said on its Twitter feed that Flight SJ182 “lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than one minute, about 4 minutes after departure from Jakarta.”
The Boeing 737-500 took off from Jakarta at about 1:56 p.m. and lost contact with the control tower at 2:40 p.m.on a domestic flight, Indonesian Transportation Ministry spokesperson Adita Irawati said.
The airline said the plane was on an estimated 90-minute flight from Jakarta to Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan province on Indonesia’s Borneo island. Most of the flight would have been over the Java Sea.
There were 56 passengers and six crew members onboard.
With Post Wires