All 108 passengers and crew miraculously survived on Saturday when a Lion Air Boeing 737 missed the runway on the balmy Indonesian resort island of Bali and landed in the sea
A Lion Air passenger plane with 108 people on board crashed into the sea off the Indonesia’s resort island of Bali on landing at Ngurah Rai International Airport, according to the airport’s operator. No deaths were reported.
The Boeing 737, which served the Bandung to Bali route, broke in two and all passengers were evacuated, with 53 people suffering light injuries, Farid Indra Nugraha, the corporate secretary of PT Angkasa Pura I, said by phone today.
TVOne showed pictures of the plane with its fuselage damaged. The weather was “visually clear” when the accident happened, Edward Sirait, the commercial director of Jakarta—based PT Lion Mentari Airlines, which operates the aircraft, told the television station. There were were 95 adults, five children, one infant and seven crew onboard, Sirait said.
“From the information that we have the plane was broken into two,” Sirait said in an telephone interview with TVOne. “Visually it is a total loss, which means we cannot use the aircraft again.”
Lion Air, Indonesia’s biggest private carrier, is considering partnerships in Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam, Sirait said in an interview April 1.
The company has placed orders of more than $45 billion with Airbus SAS and Boeing Co. in the past two years and has the world’s biggest order backlog for 559 narrow-body aircraft. It aims to have 1,000 planes in 10 years, according to Sirait.
