TASS, January 10. Divers have discovered a possible crash site of the Indonesian Boeing 737-524, the Associated Press news agency reported citing Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto.
"We received reports from the diver team that the visibility in the water is good and clear, allowing the discovery of some parts of the plane," he said in a statement. "We are sure that is the point where the plane crashed," he added.
The wreckage of the plane was discovered at a depth of 23 meters in the Java Sea.
Earlier, the Indonesian Antara news agency, citing a representative of the country’s Air Force, reported that the military managed to locate an oil slick pointing to a likely location of the jet’s crash site. Chief of Indonesia's search and rescue agency Bagus Puruhito said that the rescuers detected signals which may come from the plane’s black box and will search for their source.
The Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-524 was en route from Jakarta to Pantianak Saturday with 50 passengers and 12 crew members aboard. Some four minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed into the sea. National search and rescue services disclosed they received no emergency signals from any plane in their area of responsibility. Besides, Australian satellite systems reportedly registered no signals as well.
According to FlightRadar, the plane kept climbing for the first few minutes until it reached the altitude of 3,300 meters, but then abruptly lost 3,000 meters in less than one minute.