A collision on the runway between Garuda Indonesia flight GA425 and Sriwijaya Air flight SJ580 was narrowly averted at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Sunday evening.
According to AirNav Indonesia, GA425 was scheduled for landing right after SJ580’s take off. At around 10pm, the air traffic controller cleared SJ580 for take off, but the plane stopped on the runway. At the same time, GA425 was making its final descent.
“Realizing that, the ATC told GA425 to go around for safety reasons,” said AirNav Indonesia corporate secretary Didiet KS Radityo, as quoted by Kompas yesterday.
GA425 then cancelled its landing and circled around Jakarta until the runway was eventually cleared for its landing.
According to Sriwijaya, SJ580 stopped on the runway because of a technical issue.
“The captain made the decision not to fly the plane because a warning light indicator went off,” said Sriwijaya Air corporate officer Agus Sujono, as quoted by Kompas yesterday.
Agus said that the plane briefly underwent maintenance to rectify the problem and was eventually given permission to take off. He did not mention what the technical problem specifically was or how long the flight was delayed for.
In April of this year, another near-miss occurred between planes from the same two airlines at Soekarno-Hatta. In April 2016, a Batik Air plane clipped its wing on a Transnusa plane on Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma airport. Aviation experts say incidents like these show that improvements to the infrastructure of Indonesia’s aviation sector’s have not kept pace with the increasing demand for air travel in the country.
