The Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed on Saturday did not fly for nearly nine months last year, with air travel severely curtailed because of the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia’s Ministry of Transport said, as search teams removed one of the so-called black boxes of the Java Sea plane.
The Boeing Co. 737-500 was inspected and declared in flight condition before resuming flight operations, the ministry said.
The Indonesian aircraft carrier’s aircraft with 62 people on board crashed minutes after taking off from the country’s capital, Jakarta. Divers and the search team, who struggled with sharp debris and poor underwater visibility, managed to retrieve the plane’s flight data recorder on Tuesday, an important initial step in finding out why the SJ182 crashed.
The plane stopped operating in late March, weeks after Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case, the transport ministry said. The aircraft started flying again on December 19, after undergoing an inspection by the ministry’s General Directorate of Air Transport, he said.
His first flight after the long hiatus did not carry passengers and was not commercial, the ministry said. The plane started flying with passengers on December 22, two and a half weeks before the accident. The Ministry of Transport’s aircraft airworthiness certificate is valid until December 17, 2021, the ministry said.