Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737 passenger plane is suspected to have crashed into the sea in Indonesia

January 2021,

The 26-year-old Indonesian Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737 that had 50 passengers - including seven children and three babies - and 12 crew members on board, though the plane has a capacity of 130 (everyone on board was Indonesian, officials say) disappeared from radars four minutes after it took off from Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. It is known to have dropped more than 3,000m (12,000ft) in less than one minute according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24.com.

Witnesses have said that at least 1 explosion has been seen and heard, another number of residents near the believed crash site have found objects that they thought were from the plane. Relatives of the passengers in both Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport and Pontianak Airport have been waiting anxiously to hear any new updates on the plane, one of the relatives said "I have four family members on the flight - my wife and my three children" another one said "My wife sent me a picture of the baby today... How could my heart not be torn into pieces?"

Sriwijaya Air chief executive Jefferson Irwin Jauwena said that the plane was in a good condition and that the take-off had been delayed for 30 minutes due to heavy rain. The plane went missing 20km (12miles) north of the capital Jakarta, and it wasn’t far from another plane crash site that took place in October 2018 which resulted in a total of 189 casualties when the Indonesian plane plunged into the sea about 12 minutes after taking off; That disaster was blamed on a series of failures in the plane's design, but also faults by the airline and the pilots.

Indonesia, apparently, has a weak record on aviation safety. For more than a decade, Indonesian carriers were banned from flying to the European Union. Until recently, in 2018 when all the Indonesian airlines were removed from the EU’s blacklist.

Our hearts and minds are with the victims of the plane crash, until more information is held, it is believed for this to be a huge red flag for the Indonesian airlines.