Lion Air plagued by safety issues before tragic crash of Flight JT610
BUDGET carrier Lion Air was upgraded to a seven-star safety rating recently. But before the latest deadly crash, the airline had a disturbing history of major safety incidents.
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JUST four months ago, Lion Air’s safety rating was upgraded to the highest ranking offered by global rating agency AirlineRatings.com.
It was downgraded to a six-star rating today after Lion Air flight JT610 departing from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta crashed into the ocean 13 minutes after take-off with 189 people on board.
The budget airline was one of three Indonesian carriers to be given the seven-star safety rating in July, along with Garuda Indonesia and Batik Air.
Despite the seven-star rating, the airline has had more than a dozen major safety incidents in its two-decade history, including a fatal crash in 2004 when 25 people died.
Drug problems have also plagued the carrier, which had a number of its pilots arrested in 2012 for either taking crystal methamphetamine or being in possession of the drug.
Until today’s tragedy, the 2004 crash was the worst in the airline’s history.
Twenty four passengers and one crew member died in the November 2004 crash when a plane bound from Jakarta to Solo City, Indonesia skidded off a wet runway and broke apart.
In the next most serious incident, a Lion Air plane cracked into two pieces when it crash landed into the sea near Denpasar Airport in Bali in 2013.
The shocking images made international headlines but miraculously all passengers and crew survived.
Lion Air planes have been involved in more than 10 other safety incidents since it was launched in 1999, including when a plane lost its nose gear mid-flight in 2009 and another when a plane hit a cow and ran off a runway in 2013.
Indonesia’s airlines more broadly have had a poor safety track record over the past decade, with the European Union going so far as to blacklist all of the country’s carriers in 2007.
The last major crash in the county’s history was in December 2014, when an Indonesia AirAsia plane flying from Surabaya to Singapore crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 162 people on board.
The following August, 54 people including five children were killed flying to Oksibil in the east Indonesian province of Papua when the Trigana flight they were on crashed into mountains.
The EU lifted its ban on all Indonesian airlines earlier this year after an improvement in safety standards.
Lion Air had been taken off the EU’s blacklist in 2016.
Originally published as Lion Air plagued by safety issues before tragic crash of Flight JT610