INDONESIAN Aircraft Crashes with 189 Persons into A Sea

PRESIDENT Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have expressed shock and conveyed condolence to the families of the   Indonesian aircraft   which crashed into sea and sank with 189 people on board on Monday soon after taking off from Jakarta. The flight took off from Jakarta around 6.20 a.m. and was due to have landed in Pangkal Pinang, capital of the Bangka-Belitung tin mining region, at 7.20 a.m. It was a domestic flight to a tin-mining region, officials said. There was no sign of any survivors from the privately  owned Lion Air flight JT610, an almost new Boeing 737 MAX 8, and rescue officials said later on Monday they had recovered some human remains from the crash site, about 15 km (9 miles) off the coast. The plane lost contact with ground officials shortly after its pilot had asked to turn back to base, about 13 minutes after it took off .Indonesia is one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets although its safety record is patchy. If all aboard have died, the crash would be the country’s second-worst air disaster since 1997, experts on aviation industry said. “We don’t know yet whether there are any survivors,” search and rescue agency head Muhmmad Syaugi told a news conference, adding that no distress signal had been received from the aircraft’s emergency transmitter. “We hope, we pray, but we cannot confirm.” At least 23 government officials, four employees of state tin miner PT Timah and 3 employees of a Timah subsidiary were on the plane. A Lion Air official said on Italian passenger and one Indian pilot were on board.The plane went down in waters about 30 metres to 35 metres (98 to 115 ft) deep. Items such as handphone and life vests were found, along with the body parts. Ambulances were lined up at Karawang, on the coast east of Jakarta and police were preparing rubber dinghies, a Reuters reporter said. Fishing boats were being used to help search.Edward Sirait, chief executive of Lion Air Group, told reporters the aircraft had a technical problem on a flight from the resort island of Bali to Jakarta but it had been “resolved according to procedure”.Sirait declined to specify the nature of the issue but said none of its other aircraft of that model had the same problem.Lion had operated 11 Boeing 737 Max 8s and it had no plan to ground the rest of them, he said.The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s workhorse single-aisle jet.The head of Indonesia’s transport safety committee said he hoped the cause of the crash would be determined when the plane’s black boxes, as the cockpit voice recorder and data flight recorder are known, were recovered.“The plane is so modern, it transmits data from the plane, and that we will review too. But the most important is the blackbox,” said Soerjanto Tjahjono.US based Boeing was deeply saddened by the loss, it said in a statement, and was ready to provide technical assistance for the investigation. Indonesia’s worst air disaster was in 1997, when a Garuda Indonesia A300 crashed in the city of Medan killing 214 people. Founded in 1999, Lion Air’s only fatal accident was in 2004, when an MD-82 crashed upon landing at Solo City, killing 25 of the 163 on board, the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network says.(with inputs from ABC News)