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The Ministry of Transportation said that the flight, JT610, took off from Jakarta’s Soekarno Hatta airport at 6:10 a.m. local time on Monday (7:10 p.m. ET Sunday) and was meant to arrive at its destination about an hour later. But at 6:33 a.m. (7:33 p.m. ET Sunday), the flight lost contact with the air traffic controller.
The plane asked to return to base before disappearing from radar, according to a press statement from the transport ministry.
According to Reuters, a spokesman for the country’s search and rescue agency said that a tug boat leaving Jakarta’s port had seen the aircraft falling. Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for the National Search and Rescue Agency, told Reuters by text that the flight “has been confirmed that it has crashed.”
Debris thought to be from the aircraft was said to have been found near an offshore refining facility of state energy firm Pertamina.
The flight was identified to be a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, according to air traffic monitoring site Flightradar24.
A spokeswoman for Boeing told CNBC that the firm is “aware of reports of an airplane accident and is closely monitoring the situation.”
A spokeswoman for engine maker CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric and France’s Safran, said the plane was powered by its CFM LEAP 1B engines.
“CFM … is standing by to offer any assistance required by Lion Air, the National Transportation Safety Committee of Indonesian, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board,” she said in a statement.
“We cannot give any comment at this moment,” said Edward Sirait, chief executive of Lion Air Group. “We are trying to collect all the information and data.”
Lion Air is one of Indonesia’s youngest and biggest airlines, flying to dozens of domestic and international destinations.
In 2013, one of its Boeing 737-800 jets missed the runway while landing on the resort island of Bali, crashing into the sea without causing any fatalities among the 108 people on board.
— Reuters, The Associated Press and CNBC’s Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.
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