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Indonesia has stepped up its search for an airliner that plunged into the sea, with all 189 aboard feared dead.
Underwater beacons have been deployed to trace its black box recorders and uncover why an almost-new plane crashed minutes after take-off.
It comes as reports emerge that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft flew erratically the night before the crash.
Ground staff lost contact with flight JT610 of budget airline Lion Air 13 minutes after the aircraft took off early on Monday from the airport in Jakarta, the capital, on its way to Indonesia’s tin-mining region.
“Hopefully this morning we can find the wreckage or fuselage,” said Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of a national transport safety panel, adding that an underwater acoustic beacon was deployed to locate the main body of the plane.
The search and rescue agency added that four sonar detectors were also being used in areas where aircraft debris was found a day earlier off the shore of Karawang, West Java, and 15 vessels were scouring the sea surface.
A helicopter circled over five rubber boats carrying about 36 rescuers, as some donned rubber suits, readying to dive.
Earlier, however, a spokesman of the national search and rescue agency, had said finding survivors “would be a miracle”, judging by the condition of the recovered debris and body parts.
In a statement, Lion Air said human remains were collected in 24 body bags after sweeps of the site of the crash, in waters about 30 to 35 metres deep, roughly 15km off the coast to the northeast of Jakarta.
The bags were taken to a hospital for identification, with more expected overnight, authorities told broadcaster Metro TV.
On tarpaulins at Jakarta’s port, officers laid out items retrieved from the sea, ranging from oxygen bottles to personal items such as wallets, a mobile telephone, cash and backpacks.
Although searchers halted efforts overnight, sonar vessels and an underwater drone kept up the hunt for the wreckage, where many victims were feared trapped, officials said.
A witness in Karawang said he had heard an explosion from the beach around the time the aircraft went down.
“I thought it was thunder, but it was different from thunder – ‘Boom!’ – It was loud”.
Yesterday, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Boeing Co said they were providing badistance in the crash investigation.
The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s workhorse single-aisle jet. Indonesia’s worst air disaster was in 1997, when a Garuda Indonesia A300 crashed in the city of Medan, killing 234 people.
Privately owned Lion Air, founded in 1999, said the aircraft, which had been in operation since August, was airworthy, with its pilot and co-pilot together having ambaded 11,000 hours of flying time.
The pilot of flight JT610, which was bound for Pangkal Pinang in the Bangka-Belitung tin-mining region, had asked to return to base (RTB) shortly after take-off about 6.20am, with landing set for 7.20am in the city of Pangkal Pinang.
“An RTB was requested and had been approved but we’re still trying to figure out the reason,” Soerjanto Tjahjono told reporters yesterday.
No distress signal was received from the aircraft’s emergency transmitter, search and rescue agency head Muhmmad Syaugi told a news conference.
Lion operates 11 Boeing 737 MAX 8s and it had no plan to ground the rest of them.
The Lion Air jet flew erratically during a flight the previous evening when it experienced a “technical problem”, according to data from flight tracking website FlightRadar24.
After taking off from Denpasar on the holiday island of Bali on Sunday evening, the jet reported unusual variations in altitude and airspeed in the first several minutes of flight – including an 875-foot drop over 27 seconds when it would normally be ascending – before stabilising and flying on to Jakarta.
However, the pilots kept the plane at a maximum altitude of 28,000 feet compared with 36,000 feet on the same route earlier in the week.
Lion Air CEO Edward Sirait told reporters on Monday that a technical problem had occurred on the Denpasar-Jakarta flight but it had been resolved “according to procedure”.
Two of that flight’s pbadengers posted on Instagram, reporting that they had been concerned about problems with the air conditioning system and cabin lighting before the plane departed nearly three hours late.
“I was angry because as a pbadenger who had paid her ticket, we have every right to question the aircraft’s safety,” said one of them, TV presenter Conchita Caroline. She added there was a “weird” engine noise upon take-off that continued during flight.
It was not clear if the cabin problems were in any way related to the technical trouble mentioned by the airline’s CEO.
The Denpasar-Jakarta flight landed at 10.55pm local time on Sunday, giving engineers six-and-a-half hours at most for checks before it was dispatched for the fatal Jakarta-Pangkal Pinang flight at 6.20am on Monday.
FlightRadar24 also reported unusual air speeds and altitudes in the few minutes that Flight JT610 was in the air on Monday.
Photos of alleged technical and maintenance logs following the Sunday flight have been circulating online, but to date they have not been verified as accurate by the airline or investigators.
Mr Sirait declined to detail the maintenance procedures taken, and he told Reuters the airline had provided the relevant aircraft flight and maintenance logs to Indonesia’s National Transporation Safety Committee.
NTSC Chairman Soerjanto Tjahjono said there was a similarity between the maintenance log circulating online and the one received from Lion Air but he had not checked the exact details.
Safety experts say the crash investigation is at a very preliminary stage and it is too early to speculate about the cause.
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