This time of the year is the busiest for airlines. The last thing travelers want to hear about is airline accidents, especially those looking to fly Lion Air. Just one week after a Lion Air flight killed almost 200 people, it’s been reported that another plane crashed into a pole.
On Wednesday night on the runway at Indonesia Fatmawati Airport, the wing of the aircraft hit a metal lamp post, leaving a piece of the plane dangling. Passengers were forced to evacuate and board another plane. The airline is blaming the crash on the airport’s “aircraft movement control personnel.”
Since starting in 1999, Lion Air has had plenty of safety concerns. Three years later, everyone survived a Lion Air Boeing 737-200 crash after takeoff from Sultan Syarif Kasim II International Airport (PKU) but on other flights, passengers weren’t so lucky. In 2004, a flight for the low-budget airline skipped over a runway before landing at Surabaya Juanda International Airport in Indonesia, killing 25 people on board. Sounding like something straight out of a movie, a Lion Air flight crashed in the water surrounding Bali’s Denpasar Airport after a landing attempt failed in 2013. Parts of the plane broke in two and passengers were forced to swim to safety. A year later, the tail of a Lion Air plane hit the runway and injured two passengers.
Just last month, Lion Air flight 610 hit the Java Sea hard just a few minutes after takeoff. Called the second worst crash in Indonesia’s aviation history, the plane experienced frightening speed and altitude changes just before hitting the water. With the information from the plane’s black box, investigators believe there were unnoticed issues with the plane’s airspeed sensors, which measures the angle of the plane nose.
Until this year, due to the airline’s questionable flight history, Lion Air was banned from flying into the U.S. and Europe.
