An aviation expert has suggested a bomb could have caused a crash that has left 189 people feared dead near Indonesia.
Lion Air flight JT610 crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta. The plane was a new Boeing 737 and had only logged 800 hours in the air.
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Both pilots were experienced and between them had spent 11,000 hours in the air.
Aviation analyst Captain John Nance said there wasn't much to suggest what happened, but it was unusual that a new plane crashed.
"An aeroplane like this does not normally fall out of the sky, even a 737 of an older variety," he told The AM Show.
"There's just nothing on board the aeroplane, including the engines, that could cause a catastrophic nose over like this.
"So we're looking at the possibility of, for instance, a bomb."
Capt Nance suggested there could have been other reasons for the crash including pilot mishandling or a murder suicide.
Mechanical issues are also a possibility, but Capt Nance said he couldn't think what on the plane would have been able to cause a massive failure.
"Back in the days when you had aviation gasoline in airlines, DC7 and so on, you could have a wing blow off because something sparked on an otherwise empty tank," he said.
"We know this can happen in a cavernous tank in a 747... but that's not a thing that can happen to a 737 these days for many different reasons."
He didn't think that it was a maintenance issue though, because the plane had only been in the air for a couple of months.
"What we've got here is a flight path that doesn't make sense, outside of a bomb, or outside of some massive failure," he said.
Newshub.
