Sriwijaya Air crash places Indonesia’s aviation safety under fresh spotlight

Sriwijaya Air crash places Indonesia’s aviation safety under fresh spotlight

Indonesia, an archipelago of thousands of islands, is highly dependent on air travel.From 2007 to 2018, the European Union banned Indonesian airlines following a series of crashes and reports of deteriorating oversight and maintenance. The United States lowered its Indonesia safety evaluation to Category 2, meaning its regulatory system was inadequate, between 2007 and 2016.Indonesia's air safety record has improved in recent years, receiving a favourable evaluation by the United Nations aviation agency in 2018. But in a country with a large death toll from vehicle and ferry accidents, the safety culture is battling against a mindset that it is inevitable for some crashes to occur, experts said.Saturday's "crash has nothing to do with the MAX, but Boeing would do well to guide Indonesia - which has a chequered air safety record - to restore confidence in its aviation industry," said Shukor Yusof, the head of Malaysia-based aviation consultancy Endau Analytics.As authorities searched for the Sriwijaya jet's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, experts said it was too early to determine the factors responsible for the crash of the nearly 27-year-old plane.The flight took off from Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, the same airport from which the Lion Air jet