VIDEO MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME VIEWERS
KUALA LUMPUR: Chilling video of the final moments of several of the 189 passengers of Lion Air flight JT610, which crashed on Monday with no survivors, has emerged online.
Verified and published by the Associated Press (AP), the mobile phone footage was recorded by passenger Paul Ferdinand Ayorbaba and sent to his wife, Inchy Ayorbaba, via WhatsApp 35 minutes before the airliner took-off.
According to Inchy, Paul had recorded and shared the casually-shot video because she had been nervous over his flight, as he had never been to Indonesia’s Bangka Island.
The over one-minute video clip depicts the mundane routine of boarding a flight at the domestic terminal of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta airport.
The footage opens with Paul zooming in on his boarding pass – which clearly shows his flight number – as he and other passengers queue to have their tickets inspected by airport attendants.
Paul then walks along with other passengers – some dragging roller carry-on suitcases – down a concourse, before reaching a narrower passage which allows for a view of what is believed to be the doomed Boeing 737 MAX 8 through slatted windows.
He proceeds down an external staircase and pauses to zoom in on the jet – which would later crash into the Java Sea – before reaching the tarmac and mounting the ‘airstairs’.
The video clip ends with a segment of Inchy’s interview with Indonesia’s TVOne channel at a police hospital where she had brought her three young children for DNA tests to help identify her husband’s remains.
“(The video) was his last contact with me. His last message to me,” she said, according to AP.