Indonesia plane crash: remains and debris found

Human remains and plane wreckage have been found from the crash site of Indonesia’s Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-500 that plunged into the ocean minutes after takeoff on Saturday.

The Sriwijaya Air flight 182, was heading from Jakarta to the city of Pontianak, on the Indonesian side of Borneo, about 90 minutes flying time over the Java Sea.

According to the global flight tracking service Flightradar24, the plane lost contact at 2:40 p.m. local time (2:40 a.m. ET), 11 nautical miles north of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. Four minutes into the flight, and amid heavy rains, the plane dropped 10,000 feet in less than a minute before disappearing from the radar.

Sixty-two passengers and crew were on board, including 10 children, all of them Indonesians, according to authorities.

Five body bags containing victims have so far been handed over to the disaster victim investigation unit for identification. Authorities urged close family members to provide DNA samples or dental and medical records of the passengers to speed up the identification process of the remains.

Ten bags filled with wreckage and debris from the aircraft have now been handed to air crash investigators.

Meanwhile, authorities said that they have already pinpointed the location of two black boxes, the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, that could help to understand what happened to the aircraft.

“We have located the position of the black boxes, both of them,” said Soerjanto Tjahjanto, head of Indonesia’s transport safety agency.

The National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) teams have begun an investigation into the cause of the crash.