Indonesia continues search for debris of Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182SYDNEY/JAKARTA - Indonesia's chequered air safety record is again in the spotlight after a Sriwijaya Air jet carrying 62 people crashed into the Java Sea minutes after take-off on Saturday, marking the country's third major airline crash in just over six years.
The Lion Air crash, which killed 189 people, was an outlier in that it mainly revealed fundamental issues with the plane model and triggered a worldwide safety crisis for Boeing. Even excluding the deaths from that crash, Indonesia would rank above Russia if there are no survivors from Saturday's crash.
Indonesia's air safety record has improved in recent years, receiving a favourable evaluation by the United Nations aviation agency in 2018. But in a country with a large death toll from vehicle and ferry accidents, the safety culture is battling against a mindset that makes it inevitable for some crashes to occur, experts said.
"There has been a lot of noise made about the speed of its final descent," said Geoff Dell, an air accident investigation expert based in Australia. "It is indicative of what happened but why it happened is still in many ways a guess really. There are multiple ways you can get an aeroplane to go down at that pace."
Just before ending the pact, more than half of Sriwijaya's fleet had been grounded by the Transportation Ministry due to airworthiness concerns, according to media reports at the time.
Singapore Latest News, Singapore Headlines
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