The Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed on Saturday did not fly nearly nine months last year, as air travel was severely reduced due to the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia’s transport ministry said as search crews pulled out one of the so-called black boxes. the plane from the Java Sea.
Boeing Co. 737-500 was inspected and declared navigable before resuming flight operations, the ministry said.
The plane of the Indonesian carrier with 62 people on board crashed a few minutes after taking off from the country’s capital, Jakarta. It is believed that there are no survivors.
Divers and search crews, who faced sharp debris and low underwater visibility, managed to retrieve the plane’s flight data recorder on Tuesday, an important step in finding out why SJ182 crashed.
The plane ceased operations at the end of March, a few weeks after Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case, the transport ministry said. The aircraft began flying again on December 19, after conducting an inspection by the ministry’s Air Transport Directorate-General, the ministry said.