Sriwijaya Air 737-500 was inspected before resuming operations after being grounded as travel dropped because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed into the Java Sea on Saturday didn’t fly for nearly nine months last year, with air travel severely reduced because of the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia’s transportation ministry said.
The Boeing Co. 737-500 was inspected and declared airworthy before resuming flying operations, the ministry said.
The Indonesian carrier’s aircraft carrying 62 people went down minutes after taking off from the country’s capital, Jakarta. Divers and other crew are trying to retrieve the plane’s black boxes—the flight-data and cockpit voice recorders that can help investigators piece together what caused the crash. Searchers have encountered a series of challenges, including sharp and bulky debris, and murky waters hampering visibility.
The plane had stopped operating in late March, weeks after Indonesia announced its first Covid-19 case, the transportation ministry said. The aircraft began flying again on Dec. 19, after clearing an inspection by the ministry’s Air Transportation Directorate General, it said.
Its first flight after the long hiatus didn’t carry passengers and was noncommercial, the ministry said. The plane began flying with passengers on Dec. 22, 2½ weeks before the crash. The aircraft’s certificate of airworthiness from the transport ministry is valid until Dec. 17, 2021, the ministry said.
