Jakarta, Indonesia - Distraught and angry relatives of those killed when a Lion Air jet crashed last week have confronted the airline's co-founder during a meeting Monday arranged by Indonesian officials.
Rusdi Kirana, the co-founder, was not invited to speak by Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi, who moderated the meeting between relatives and the officials who are overseeing the search effort and accident investigation.
But he stood and bowed his head after angry and distraught family members demanded that Kirana, who with his brother Kusnan Kirana founded Lion Air in 1999, identify himself.
The Lion Air jet crashed into the Java Sea on October 29 just 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta.
After the meeting, Kirana left in a hurry, avoiding questions from reporters.
Many families face an agonizing wait for missing relatives to be identified. Police medical experts have received nearly 140 body bags of human remains and have identified 14 victims.
Officials move an engine recovered from the crashed Lion Air jet for further investigation in Jakarta. Picture: Achmad Ibrahim/AP
Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of the National Transportation Safety Committee, said information downloaded from the flight data recorder is consistent with reports the plane's speed and altitude were erratic. Searchers are still trying to locate the cockpit voice recorder.
He said the large amount of small debris and the relatively small area the debris was found in showed the 2-month-old Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane hit the water at a very high speed.
"The plane was intact when it plunged to the sea, it did not explode in the air, and the aircraft engine was running when it touched the water at high RPM — it's marked by the loss of all blades of the turbine," he said.
The Lion Air crash is the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since 1997, when 234 people died on a Garuda flight near Medan. In December 2014, an AirAsia flight from Surabaya to Singapore plunged into the sea, killing all 162 on board.
Lion Air is one of Indonesia's youngest airlines but has grown rapidly, flying to dozens of domestic and international destinations. It has been expanding aggressively in Southeast Asia, a fast-growing region of more than 600 million people.