Lion Air Flight With Indian Captain Crashes At Sea; No Survivors Says Indonesia, Six Bodies Recovered Till Now

Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency (SAR) has said that a Lion Air Boeing 737 flight JT 610 from Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, to the city of Pangkal Pinang with 189 people on board has crashed.

As reported by CNN, there were 181 passengers on board the plane with six crew members and two pilots. The plane took off at 6.21 am (Indoneshian Standard Time), from Soekarno-Hatta International airport in Tangerang, Greater Jakarta and was scheduled to land in Pagkal Pinan at 7.30 am.

Lion Air’s spokesperson told CNN that communication with the plane stopped soon after the plane’s take off.

The head of the National Transport Safety Committee (NTSC) Soerjanto Tjahjono, said that the aircraft was last detected on the radar at 6.22 am at a height of 2,500 to 3,000 feet.

According to the report, the last recorded trace of the flight was in the Thousand Islands regency, an archipelago north of Jakarta. Indonesian authorities asked for assistance from the Australian Air traffic controllers but they also were unable to detect the aircraft.

Boats, helicopters and 130 rescuers had been deployed by the SAR to the vicinity of the crash site, 34 nautical miles off the coast near Jakarta, in the Java sea. The search teams are working on the assumption that the plane had sunk and are carrying equipment to detect an underwater locator beacon.

Reports suggests that Indian pilot Bhavye Suneja captained the Indonesian plane. The 31-year-old captain has 6,000 flight hours and was a resident of Jakarta originally from New Delhi. He attended Ahlcon Public School in Mayur Vihar.

Latest reports say that all the 189 passengers and crew abroad the plane were ‘likely’ dead and that six bodies had been retrieved off the sea in Jakarta.