- Lion Air Flight JT 610 crashed into the sea on Monday morning, and officials say everyone on board most likely died.
- Another Lion Air flight landed in the sea in 2013, but nobody died.
- The 2013 flight had just missed the runway, while the crash on Monday happened farther out to sea.
- While the two crashes are quite different, Monday’s crash has put the spotlight on Lion Air and Indonesia’s other airlines, which were until recently barred from traveling to the EU.
- Lion Air previously had one fatal accident, in 2004.
Lion Air, the Indonesian airline whose flight crashed into the sea on Monday and is believed to have killed all 189 people on board, had another plane land in the sea in 2013, though no one died then.
In April 2013, all 108 passengers and crew members survived after a Lion Air plane missed the runway on the resort island of Bali and landed on the water, where it split in two.
A passenger on that flight, Tantri Widiastuti, 60, told an Indonesian TV station, according to Reuters: “There was no sign at all it would fall but then suddenly it dropped into the water. I saw holes in the floor of the plane … We were evacuated quickly.”
A Lion Air spokesman told Reuters at the time that the plane "probably failed to reach the runway and fell into the sea."
While several people were taken to a hospital, the 101 passengers and seven crew members survived.
The two crashes are quite different, but the starkest difference is that Flight JT 610's sea crash-landing on Monday morning is believed to have killed all 189 people on board.
The Boeing 737 Max 8, which took off from Jakarta around 6:20 a.m. local time and was bound for Bangka Island, was much farther from the airport when it crashed less than 20 minutes into the flight.
Plane wreckage and body parts have been recovered from the crash site, authorities said. Photos from news agencies and others posted on social media show officials moving body bags at a nearby port where the rescue operation is working.
Yusuf Latief, a spokesman for Indonesia's search-and-rescue agency, told Reuters there were most likely no survivors. The agency said in a statement that the reason for the crash was still unclear.
The crash highlighted Indonesia's air-safety record.
The airline, founded in 1999, has recorded at least a dozen accidents since 2002, Quartz reported. Its only other fatal incident was in 2004, when an MD-82 crashed, killing 25 people, according to Reuters.
The EU in June removed Indonesia's airlines from its safety blacklist, which they had been on since 2007, though Lion Air itself was removed in 2016.
The plane that crashed on Monday was reportedly delivered to the airline in August. It had a technical problem on its way to Jakarta that was "resolved according to procedure," Edward Sirait, the CEO of Lion Air Group, told reporters.
Australian government officials have been told not to fly Lion Air in light of Monday's crash, The Guardian reported.
"Following the fatal crash of a Lion Air plane on 29 October 2018, Australian government officials and contractors have been instructed not to fly on Lion Air," an email to the officials said, per the report. "This decision will be reviewed when the findings of the crash investigation are clear."
Read more of Business Insider's coverage of the Lion Air crash:
- The pilot of the downed Lion Air flight asked to turn back right before it crashed into the sea
- The Indonesian Lion Air flight JT 610 aircraft that crashed into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff was brand new and delivered to Lion Air just 2 months ago
- What we know about the victims of the Lion Air plane crash where there were 'likely no survivors'