By The Sriwijaya plane carrying more than 60 people has crashed into the Java Sea minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry said that the last contact with the plane, Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, was at 2:40 p.m. local time. The plane was bound for the city of Pontianak on the island of Borneo.
It had 62 people aboard, according to the Transportation Ministry; four minutes after taking off amid a heavy monsoon season rain, following a bad weather delay, the 26-year-old plane lost more than 10,000 feet in altitude in less than 60 seconds, according to Flightradar24, the flight-tracking service.
The Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency said that it had found pieces of debris in waters just northwest of Jakarta that it believed may be from the plane’s wreckage, but that darkness and inclement weather had impeded its search. The area where the debris was found is known as the Thousand Islands.
“Tomorrow we are going to survey the location,” Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, said on Saturday evening.
