A passenger was lucky to escape injury after an entire row of three seats they were sitting in suddenly collapsed as the Boeing 737, operated by the Malaysian airline Batik Air, was still taking off.
This wasn’t simply a case of the seat recline failing, but rather, the entire row of seats seemingly came free of the seat track, which it is meant to be bolted into.
According to local media reports, the flight attendants jumped into action and made sure the passenger was safe before moving them to an alternative seat – thankfully, there were spare seats available.
How exactly this happened remains a mystery, although Batik Air is said to have opened an investigation.
Flight attendants are accustomed to seeing plenty of mechanical issues with seats – from broken armrests and headrests, seat reclines that refuse to lock in the takeoff and landing position, or even seatback screens falling clean out of their socket.
There’s normally nothing that happens to a passenger seat that can’t be fixed with a few pieces of duct tape – some flight attendants even carry their own roll of tape for exactly this kind of eventuality (duct tape can even double up as an emergency restraint system for unruly passengers).
That being said, I don’t think that duct tape would have been much use in this particular situation.
Founded in 2012 as a full-service subsidiary of Indonesia’s Lion Air Group, Batik Air operates a fleet of more than 100 single-aisle aircraft consisting of both Boeing 737s and Airbus A320 series airplanes.
Although Batik Air had a brief but failed foray into long-haul flights using widebody aircraft, the furthest the airline now flies is to destinations like Sydney from Denpasar, which clocks in at nearly six hours.
The airline has suffered a number of notable incidents, including in January 2024 when both pilots accidentally fell asleep at the controls of an Airbus A320 while flying from Kendari to Jakarta.
During this incident, the Captain had been using ‘controlled rest’ to sleep at the controls, while the First Officer maintained control of the aircraft. But around 28 minutes after the last communication with air traffic control, the Captain woke up to discover the First Officer was asleep.
It’s not known how long the First Officer had been asleep.
Last month, Batik Air also made international headlines when it emerged that an Indonesian woman had been arrested for impersonating one of its flight attendants when she wore a fake uniform and ID badge on one of its flights.
Apparently, the 23-year-old woman had tried to get a job at Batik Air as a flight attendant but discovered she had actually fallen victim to a hoax. Too ashamed to tell the truth to her family, she came up with a plan to fool her relatives into thinking she had really been hired by Batik Air.
The woman bought a counterfeit version of Batik Air’s distinctive uniform, which comprises a white kebaya blouse and a patterned skirt, online, and even managed to get hold of a fake airline ID badge.
She then went to the airport and bought a normal passenger ticket to travel on a Batik Air flight from Palembang’s Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II Airport to Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
During the flight, however, the working crew members became suspicious and asked her basic questions about the job that she was unable to answer. The police were called to meet the aircraft, and the woman admitted what she had done.
