Indonesian airplane disappears four minutes after take-off

The Sriwijaya air passenger plane lost contact with its control tower four minutes after take-off. There are an estimated 59 passengers—including seven children and three babies—and 12 crew on board, all reported to be Indonesian.

The plane is thought to have dropped more than 3,000 m (10,000 ft) in less than a minute, according to flight tracking website Flightradar24.com.

Divers search through what is believed to be the plane’s wreckage

The Indonesian navy has released footage of divers searching through the wreckage of a passenger plane believed to be the Sriwijaya passenger plane.

The search teams have already found aircraft parts and human remains. The recordings from the plane’s black boxes’, which have been located, are yet to be recovered.

One official stressed the urgency of the search mission, which resumed on Monday morning, calling it a “24-hour” operation.

“It’s going to be an around-the-clock operation,” Rasman MS, head of the search and rescue agency’s crash operations told reporters.

“There will be no breaks. The sooner we can find the victims, the better.”

However, there seems to be no hope of finding survivors.

The Sriwijaya air passenger plane said to be “in good condition” before the flight

The missing aircraft is a 26-year-old Boeing 737-500. It’s sister model, the 737 Max was grounded from March 2019 until last December following two deadly crashes.

The Sriwijaya Air chief executive Jefferson Irwin Jauwena told reporters that the plane was in good condition before its flight. He also added that take-off had been delayed for 30 minutes due to the heavy rain.

The plane went missing about 20 km (12 miles) north of the capital Jakarta, not far from where another flight crashed in October 2018.

That disaster was blamed on a series of failures in the plane’s design, but also on faults by the airline and the pilots.