Gov't Says No Foreigners on Board Sriwijaya Air Flight 182

Jakarta. The authorities have confirmed that there were no foreigners among 62 passengers on board the Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, serviced by Boeing 737-524 plane, which is believed to have crashed off the coast north of Jakarta on Saturday. 

"All the passengers on board were Indonesians," National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) chief Soerjanto Tjahjono said in a press conference on Saturday. 

Soerjanto said the Committee had informed the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized agency of the United Nations for civil aviation safety, about the crash. 

"According to the protocols, we have informed NTSB and ICAO. Because there were no foreigners on board, we did not inform safety boards in other countries, only the US," which was the producer country of the ill-fated aircraft, Soerjanto said. 

Crash Timeline

The transportation ministry said that Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 lost contact with the air traffic control four minutes after taking off from Soekarno Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten, at 02:36 p.m. Western Indonesia Time on Saturday. The aircraft was supposed to arrive at Supadio International Airport at 03:15 p.m., but it never did. 

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said that the air traffic control warned the aircraft that it had steered away from the planned course. Still, the aircraft disappeared from radar seconds later, apparently without sending any distress signal. 

At 02:37 p.m., the aircraft was still in a position at an altitude of 1,200 feet and was allowed to rise to 29,000 feet by following the standard departure protocol.

"At 14:40 WIB, an air traffic officer in Jakarta saw that Sriwijaya Air was not in the direction it should have been at 075 degrees, but steered northwest. When asked to report, Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 disappeared from the radar within seconds," Budi Karya said. 

The Boeing 737-524 aircraft lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude under a minute, suggesting a free-fall, data from Flightradar, a Swedish internet-based flight tracker, showed. 

Witnesses near Laki Island, one of the islands in the Thousand Islands district, told local media that they heard two large bang on Saturday. 

The transportation ministry's patrol boats reported they had pulled debris and the emergency stair suspected coming from the Boeing 737-524 plane as well as human body parts from the waters near the Laki Island. 

The aircraft carried 50 passengers, including seven children and three babies, and twelve flight crews, six of them off duty.