The Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed on Saturday did not fly for nearly nine months last year, severely reducing air travel due to the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia’s Transport Ministry said, as search personnel removed one of the plane’s so-called black boxes. pulled. Java Sea.
The Boeing Co. 737-500 was inspected and declared airworthy before flying operations resumed, the ministry said.
The Indonesian carrier’s plane with 62 people on board went down minutes after take-off from the country’s capital, Jakarta. It is believed that there are no survivors.
Scuba divers and search personnel, struggling with sharp debris and poor underwater visibility, managed to recover the plane’s flight data recorder on Tuesday, an important early step in discovering why SJ182 crashed.
The plane had stopped operating in late March, weeks after Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case, the Transport Ministry said. The plane started flying again on Dec. 19, after approval of an inspection by the Ministry’s Directorate-General for Air Transport, the ministry said.