Boeing officials and US aviation experts to visit Sriwijaya Air crash site after Indonesia grants coronavirus waiver

Indonesian investigators are still searching for the black boxes of the doomed passenger jet, a Boeing 737-500

Indonesia’s Transport Ministry on Tuesday said it passed an airworthiness inspection last month after being grounded during the coronavirus pandemic

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Indonesia officials inspect wreckage from Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182 at Tanjung Priok port, north of Jakarta. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:08pm, 12 Jan 2021Updated: 5:11pm, 12 Jan 2021

Representatives from Boeing and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will leave for Jakarta this week to assist an investigation into Saturday’s crash of a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet, which hurtled into the Java Sea with 62 people on board.

The Indonesian government granted a waiver allowing the Boeing and NTSB officials to enter the country during its coronavirus-related travel ban, a person familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named.

Indonesian investigators are still searching for the black boxes of the doomed passenger jet, a Boeing 737-500. Based on an assessment of the plane’s turbine discs and fan blades, the engines may still have been running when the Boeing hit the water, National Transportation Safety Commission chairman Soerjanto Tjahjono said in a statement on Tuesday.

The aircraft, registered PK-CLC and with capacity for about 120 passengers, was on its fifth flight of the day when it crashed shortly after taking off from Jakarta at 2.36pm local time, according to aviation website FlightRadar24. It flew several short hops in the days leading up to the crash, including nine flights on December 31 and eight on January 4. All six flights on January 7 were delayed by at least an hour.

The black boxes will provide more information about what caused the plane to plunge more than 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds. Investigators have detected the pingers that are used to locate the flight recorders, which capture sound in the cockpit and monitor flight data.

Both pilots in command of Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 were experienced and the airline has a solid safety record, with no fatal accidents since it was founded in 2003. The plane itself was old – more than 26 years – but Indonesia’s Transport Ministry on Tuesday said it passed an airworthiness inspection on December 14 after being grounded during the coronavirus pandemic.

The plane flew five days later with no passengers and then resumed commercial flights on December 22, the ministry said.

The much newer Boeing 737 MAX is a separate model recently emerging from a 20-month global grounding after two fatal crashes, the first of which involved a Lion Air flight also plunging into the Java Sea, in October 2018.