Sriwijaya Air said the 62 people on board comprised 50 passengers and 12 airline employees, of whom six were on duty as flight crew. There were 40 adults, seven children and three infants among the passengers. All those on board were Indonesian, the country’s transport safety committee said.

Why does Indonesia have such a notorious air safety record?

Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said he had been instructed by President Joko Widodo to “maximise” search efforts and had deployed vessels from Basarnas, the national search and rescue agency. The Navy was also involved in the search and authorities were trying to establish what the weather was like when the flight took off.

“We are very concerned about this situation,” the minister said.

He added that SJ 182 was attempting to climb to 29,000 feet but at 2.40pm, when it failed to follow directions given by the Air Traffic Controller and instead headed northwest, the controller radioed the pilot to ask for a report.

“Within seconds, [the plane] was gone from the radar,” Budi said.

Bambang Suryoaji, the head of operations at Basarnas, said the plane was “suspected” to have crashed between Laki and Lancang Islands.

“We deployed our team, boats and sea riders to the location suspected to be where it went down after losing contact.

“We’ve also received some information that some plane debris [believed to be from the Sriwijaya Air plane] has been found but we’ve not been able to verify this,” he said.

The Indonesian Navy had pinpointed the site of the missing aircraft and ships had been sent there, Navy official Abdul Rasyid said.

Plane tracking website FlightRadar24 tweeted that SJ 182 lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than one minute and that the aircraft was about 26 years old. The aircraft had been operated by Sriwijaya Air since 2012, according to fleet data on Planespotters.net, and was previously used by Continental Air Lines and United Airlines Holdings Inc.

Local news channel MetroTV reported that fishermen in the Thousand Islands regency off Jakarta had found debris and an oil spill in the water, but there was no confirmation that this was from the plane.

“We are aware of media reports from Jakarta, and are closely monitoring the situation,” Boeing spokeswoman Zoe Leong said in a statement.

The president director of Sriwijaya Air, Jefferson Irwin Jauwena, said boarding for SJ 182 was delayed for 30 minutes because of “heavy rain”.

“The plane was in good condition,” he added, saying it had been used on the Pontianak route before.

Yaman Zai, a father of three children who were aboard the plane with their mother, said that he was at the airport in Pontianak waiting for them, when he heard the news.

“I will never meet her again,” he said, holding up a photo of his oldest daughter.

Its poor aviation history saw carriers from the nation banned from the European Union in 2007 and it was only in June 2018 that the full ban was lifted. In 1997, Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 crashed approaching an airport in Medan in North Sumatra, killing 234. The AirAsia Flight 8501 that crashed in late 2014 was en route to Singapore from Surabaya.

Indonesia’s KNKT safety agency was expected to launch an immediate investigation. The US National Safety Transportation Board will automatically be part of the probe, since the plane was designed and built in America.

Founded in 2003, Jakarta-based Sriwijaya Air group flies largely within Indonesia, though it has flights to Penang in Malaysia and Dili in East Timor.

The airline has had a solid safety record until now, with no on board casualties in four incidents recorded on the Aviation Safety Network database, though a farmer was killed when a Boeing 737-200 left the runway in 2008 following a hydraulic problem.

Additional reporting by Reuters, Bloomberg and Agence France-Presse