Dhaka: An Indonesian passenger jet carrying over 60 people crashed into the Java Sea on January 9, minutes after taking off from the Indonesian capital Jakarta, said the country’s officials.

Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry said that the last contact with the plane Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 was made at 2:40 pm local time.

The Boeing 737-524 was bound for the city of Pontianak on the island of Borneo. The plane had 62 people aboard, according to an official from the Indonesian airline Sriwijaya Air based in Jakarta.

Four minutes after taking off amid heavy rain, the 26-year-old plane lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than 60 seconds, according to the flight-tracking service Flightradar24.

The Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency said it had found pieces of debris in waters just northwest of Jakarta that it believed may be from the plane’s wreckage, but it said that darkness had impeded its search. The area where the debris was found is known as the Thousand Islands.

Sriwijaya Air said in a preliminary statement that “management is still communicating and investigating this matter and will immediately issue an official statement after obtaining the actual information.”

The airline, which is Indonesia’s third-largest carrier and began operations in 2003, has never had a fatal crash before.

The country’s aviation safety commission said that it was on alert and that the transportation minister had gone to the international airport in Jakarta. Patrol boats combed the waters where the plane was believed to have crashed. “Whenever we hear this kind of news, we get ready,” Ony Suryo Wibowo, an investigator for the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee, said on January 9. “We are gathering all the information we can get.”

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