Founders of Indonesia’s Lion Air mull new airline

A group of founders of Lion Air Group, including its co-owner Rusdi Kirana, has filed an application for an Air Operator’s Certificate (AOC) for a new airline that would allow the group to distance itself from the 2018 Lion Air (JT, Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta) B737-8 crash, Bloomberg has reported. While a Lion Air spokesperson declined to comment on the development, a Ministry of Transport official, Budi Prayitno, confirmed that authorities were processing several new AOC applications but would not go into details about their identities. At this stage, it is unclear if the recertification procedure has been launched by Lion Air Group (which also includes Wings Air (Indonesia), Batik Air, Malindo Air, and Thai Lion Air) itself or by the same founders but without formal affiliation with the group. The October 2018 crash of Lion Air’s B737 MAX 8 PK-LQP (msn 43000) shortly after take-off from Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta was the first of two fatal crashes attributed to the failure of the type’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) system. The second crash, of an Ethiopian Airlines B737 MAX 8 in March 2019, prompted the type’s global and ongoing grounding.