A Lion Air 737 Goes for an Accidental Swim in Bali (Crash Photos and Details)

April 13, 2013 at 5:52 AM | by JetSetCD | Comments (0)

Just before 5:10am EST this morning, it was reported that an aircraft had gone into the water off the runway at Bali's Airport at 15:10pm local time. That was a simple newsflash, but additional details have emerged in the minutes since, and here is what we know:*

· The aircraft, a Lion Air Boeing 737-800 (registration PK-LKS), was operating a flight from Bandung, Indonesia to Denpasar/Bali, Indonesia when it overran the runway on landing.

· Both ends of the runway at Ngurah Rai International Airport (DPS) are bordered by the ocean. The 737 was unable to stop before continuing off the edge and into the water on the runway's western end. The force and trip into the water caused rear fuselage to break, just behind the trailing edge of the wing.

· It has been reported that all passengers and crew survived, though some have been transported to a hospital for injuries. There are also conflicting numbers on how many were onboard; it's either 172 or 108 passengers and crew.

· It is believed that the aircraft is only two months old, a fact which caused David Kaminski-Morrow, Air Transport Editor for Flight International, to remark on Twitter that it's "practically the aviation equivalent of driving the new car out of the showroom, into a lamp post."

As passengers dry off and news media sweeps into Bali, we can expect more updates as Saturday ends in Indonesia and only just begins for us here in the US.

*Sources: PlaneFinder; Reuters UK

Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport has only one large runway, which can't be called short. It is capable of handling even Boeing jumbo jets, as we found out ourselves last year when we landed in a 747 on this very same runway. We took off, however, on an Air Asia A320 after unsuccessfully trying to book a flight on Lion Air (their website was returning an error message for Visa card transactions at the time).

Lion Air is an Indonesian low-cost airline, a bit like the EasyJet of Indonesia. They already don't have the best safety record, and have occupied a place on the European Union's list of banned airlines. They are on the rise in Indonesia right now, however, buying up both Airbus and Boeing jets to satisfy the travel demands of a growing middle class with disposable income for the affordable regional flights in which Lion Air specializes.

Lion Air is definitely making waves in Southeast Asian aviation; they had just hoped those waves would be of a...less literal sort.

We circled the approximate location of the aircraft

The end of the runway where the dip in the ocean occurred is a point highly visible from both Kuta and Jimbaran beaches, perhaps the most popular sand stretches for tourism on Bali. The photo below shows our view from lunch on the very southern end of Jimbaran Beach.

Our own photo from April 2012, showing Jimbaran Beach and the view to aircraft operating in the distance, in the exact area of today's accident