The fatal crash on Saturday of a Boeing 737-500, flown by Indonesian airline Sriwijaya Air, killed all 62 people aboard – yet one booked passenger is still alive and unharmed, all because of a test for Covid-19.
The Aviation Herald, an authoritative aeronautical website published by Simon Hradecky, carried a brief report about a passenger who waited in the airport in Jakarta to board flight SJ-182 to Pontianak on the island of Borneo.
While other passengers boarded, the man was still waiting (in some anxiety, no doubt) for his Covid-19 PCR test results to arrive. They did not turn up in time, so he could not board the flight.
“Only after the aircraft had already departed the (negative) test results arrived which would have permitted him to board the flight,” the Aviation Herald reported.
In the event, the flight took off without the man and shortly afterwards plunged into the Java Sea, following a loud explosion, killing all 56 passengers (including seven children and three babies) and six crew aboard.
Investigations continue and yesterday rescue teams retrieved debris, seats and body parts from the sea.
Possible causes might include catastrophic engine failure, uncontrolled decompression or a particularly violent storm cell in a region known for storms, but it could be months or longer before a cause is found. Signals from the “black box” flight recorders have been detected.
Fishermen at sea in the Thousand Islands region where the crash occurred say they heard two explosions, then encountered debris floating in the sea in heavy rain.
“We heard something explode; we thought it was a bomb or a tsunami since after that we saw the big splash from the water,” one fisherman said.
The captain of a ship with 28 crew, roughly 10 kilometres from the impact site, said his crew saw an object hurtle into the sea (which is about 23 metres deep at the site) and found flight jackets, body parts and debris from an aircraft bobbing on the waves.
ABC News in Australia quoted Sriwijaya Air president-director Jefferson Irwin Jauwena saying the plane, which is 26 years old and previously used by airlines in the US, was airworthy. It had been delayed by bad weather, not by any mechanical problem.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet operated by Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea in a similar incident, also just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people aboard. The MAX crash was one of two crashes of that plane type which resulted in the model being grounded. The crash this weekend does not seem to be related – the crashed plane was much older than the MAX and did not have the system fitted suspected to have contributed to the MAX crash.
Sriwijaya Air has had several incidents in the past, most of them minor, though a farmer was killed in 2008 when a plane swerved off the runway on landing. According to Wikipedia, Sriwijaya Air received the Boeing International Award for Safety and Maintenance in 2007, awarded after an inspection carried out over a few months.
Written by Peter Needham
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