What to Know About the Boeing 737-500 Sriwijaya Air Aircraft Crash

The crash of a aircraft in Indonesia carrying extra than 60 people today comes at a hard time for the aviation huge Boeing, which has seen its standing battered by decades of investigations over lethal crashes.

Whilst the authorities are nonetheless on the lookout for the lead to, the plane that crashed on Saturday near Jakarta, the Indonesian cash, was a 26-12 months-old 737-500, a workhorse product with a great protection document. The plane at the heart of the Boeing crisis was the 737 Max, a later on version with faulty antistall software package that led to two lethal crashes.

Below is what to know about the Boeing aircraft in the Indonesia crash.

What brought about the Boeing airplane crash in Indonesia?

It is unclear what brought on the crash. Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, which was touring to the city of Pontianak on the island of Borneo, took off amid a large monsoon time rain, adhering to a poor climate delay. It plunged much more than 10,000 toes in less than a minute, according to the monitoring web page Flightradar24.

Indonesia, an archipelago nation of 1000’s of islands, is seriously dependent on air travel. Nevertheless the place has a extensive historical past of aviation accidents, Sriwijaya Air experienced not had a single deadly crash considering that it started functions in 2003.

The plane concerned in the Sriwijaya Air crash, which shed get hold of shortly right after takeoff from Jakarta on Saturday, was a Boeing 737-500, a verified design created in the 1980s, and not the troubled 737 Max airliner, which was grounded after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

How is the 737-500 various from the 737 Max?

The airplane concerned in the crash on Saturday is an before product of the 737, and it experienced been in operation for 26 several years. It was earlier flown by Continental Airlines and United Airlines in advance of it was shipped to Sriwijaya Air in 2012, in accordance to the Airfleets online databases.

The 737-500 does not share the same antistall process as the 737 Max, which was brought on in the 2018 crash of a further Indonesian flight, Lion Air Flight 610, killing all 189 folks aboard. The similar program was blamed in the crash of a 737 Max in Ethiopia in March 2019, which killed 157.

Those people crashes forced the grounding of the Max fleet around the globe and a crisis for Boeing. The business fired its main executive and said previous yr that the Max grounding would cost it additional than $18 billion, a sharp blow even before the coronavirus pandemic pummeled the field.

Past week, the firm claimed it experienced agreed to pay back $2.5 billion, like $500 million for a victims fund, to solve a felony conspiracy charge to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration about analysis of the 737 Max.

The troubled 737 Max resumed traveling previous thirty day period, with American Airways Flight 718 building the initial professional flight of the aircraft just after the F.A.A. lifted its grounding purchase in November. Ahead of they are permitted to fly all over again, each individual 737 Max plane should have its wiring and software modified.

What is the background of the Boeing 737-500?

The 737-500 was released with the invest in of 20 planes in 1987 by Southwest Airways. The airline utilised the model, with a potential of 122, to additional efficiently take care of longer routes with a scaled-down range of travellers, Southwest’s company historian, Richard West, wrote in 2016. That want dropped as its extended-haul vacation business improved, and Southwest’s past 737-500 flew in September 2016.

Historically, the 737-500 has been a safe and sound plane to fly. The collection it belongs to, which involves the 737-300 and 737-400, has experienced 19 deadly incidents around more than a few decades in operation, or about just one fatal incident for each 4 million departures, according to a 2019 Boeing report.

4 previous fatal incidents have been recorded in the 737-500, such as crashes in South Korea in 1993, Tunisia in 2002 and in Russia in 2008 and 2013, in accordance to the Aviation Basic safety Network.

Which airways fly it?

Boeing manufactured 389 of the 737-500 prior to the product was discontinued. As many as 100 stay in use by smaller airways about the earth in nations around the world including Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Russia and Ukraine, according to the monitoring web page Planespotters.internet.