Plane crash adds to aviation disasters’ list in Indonesia

Bloomberg

The crash of Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 is another blight on Indonesia’s already poor aviation safety record.
The country has had several incidents linked to safety issues in the past, including poor maintenance, pilot training, communications or mechanical failures and air-traffic control problems. It’s the worst place in Asia to take an airplane, with 104 accidents and 2,353 related fatalities, data from Aviation Safety Network show.
What sent Flight SJ182 hurtling into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff isn’t yet clear and likely won’t be until the plane’s black box is retrieved and examined. But two things are known — the jet was flying in heavy rain and the Boeing Co model was almost 27 years old.
It belonged to the airline manufacturer’s family of 737 jets, one of the most successful aircraft of all time. The make first began flying in 1967 and has been through several iterations. The Sriwijaya Air jet in question was a 737-500, part of Boeing’s Classic series that also includes the 737-300 and the 737-400.
The 737 Max series was introduced later in 2017, and that was the version involved in two fatal crashes: Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019.
Globally, Boeing delivered about 390 of the 737-500 models, which are designed to transport 145 people at capacity. Those flown by Sriwijaya Air,
one of Indonesia’s newest domestic carriers that serves a plethora of small, regional destinations across the Southeast Asian nation, are configured
for 120 — 112 in economy
class and eight in the executive cabin, according to the carrier’s website.
But with commercial airlines typically replacing jets at around the 25-year mark, Sriwijaya’s was on the older side. Before it came into the hands of the carrier in 2012, it had been flown by Continental Air Lines and United Airlines Holdings, according to fleet data on Planespotters.net. The average age of Sriwijaya’s Boeing fleet is around 17 years.
Excluding a Boeing 737-900 that had its first flight in 2014, that average fleet age extends out to almost 19 years, Bloomberg calculations show. That compares with an average fleet age for flag carrier PT Garuda Indonesia of 8.3 years.
“We don’t know yet what caused the incident,” said Shukor Yusof, the founder of aviation consulting firm Endau Analytics in Malaysia. It’s not just an aircraft’s age that can result in problems.
Indonesia, home to one of Earth’s biggest archipelagos, a chain of islands that spooled out would stretch from London to New York, has one of the highest incidences of thunderstorms and lightning strikes anywhere.