Jakarta A Lion Air Boeing 737 passenger plane came down crashing minutes after taking off from here on Monday, said Indonesian officials.
“It has been confirmed that it has crashed,” Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for the national search and rescue agency told the media.
The scheduled Flight JT-610 was headed to Pangkal Pinang, the main city in the Bangka Belitung Islands from the Indonesian capital.
It lost contact with ground control a few minutes after take-off, as it was crossing the sea, the BBC reported.
At 6.45 a.m. a vessel traffic service officer, Suyadi, received a report from a tugboat, AS Jaya II, that the crew had seen the debris of a plane, The Jakarta Post reported
They suspected it to be the Lion Air flight floating near Tanjung Bungin in Karawang in West Java.
“At 7.15 a.m. the tugboat reported it had approached the site and the crew saw the debris of a plane,” Suyadi said. As of 9 a.m. there was no report about the passengers or the plane crew on board, he said.
Two other ships, a tanker and a cargo ship, near the location were approaching the site, Suyadi said, and a Basarnas rescue boat was also on its way.
Information gathered by the Jakarta Post said that the plane, Lion Air 610, took off from Jakarta at 6.20 a.m. and contact was lost at 6.33 a.m.
It was not immediately clear how many people were on board the plane, a Lion Air official earlier told the BBC, and added that the company did not yet know what had happened to the plane.
The aircraft was reported to be a Boeing 737 MAX 8, a model only in use since 2016.
(IANS)
