‘I’m still shocked’: Indonesian airline crash shakes small fishing village

Hendrik Mulyadi was checking his crab traps when he heard a huge explosion on the water nearby. The sea suddenly rose, lifting the Indonesian fisherman’s boat as smoke filled the air. “I’m lucky it didn’t hit me,” he recalled on Monday, sitting at his home on Lancang Island and still visibly shaken by what he saw. “It was like lightning, very fast. It exploded when it hit the water. I saw debris floating. It was airplane debris.” Hendrik, 30, was one of five crab fishermen who were out working on the water Saturday afternoon when Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 fell from the sky minutes after takeoff with 62 people onboard, 10 of them children and babies. The plane crashed into the Java Sea, about 300 feet from where Hendrik was fishing. Normally a sleepy island with relatively few visitors, Lancang has become a base for the aircraft search and recovery operation led by Basarnas, Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency. The crash site is less than a mile from the island’s mangroves, coconut and banana trees. The Sriwijaya flight, which was bound for the city of Pontianak on the island of Borneo, is the third passenger plane in just over six years to crash into the Java Sea after departing from airports on Java island. By Sunday, searchers had located the airplane’s flight data recorders and hoped to recover them soon. But it could take months before investigators determine the cause of the crash. Efforts continued Monday to extract bodies and recover the data recorders from the wreckage. The Sriwijaya plane, a Boeing 737-500, was deemed safe to fly before takeoff and the airline had never suffered a crash that resulted in fatalities on board. More than 50 ships and thousands of people are involved in the search and recovery.<br/>