Lion Air

Is Lion Air safe?

Lion Air flies millions of people a year across Indonesia, and most flights are uneventful. But its safety record is much weaker than that of Garuda Indonesia (70) or AirAsia (68). Its 737 MAX crashed in October 2018, killing all 189 on board, and it has written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary six other jets in landing accidents since 2006. As an IATA member it now passes the IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit, and it has had no major accident since 2018. We score it 54.

Lion Air or another Lion Group airline?

The Lion Group runs several airlines, each with its own certificate (AOC). Only the first row counts on this page.

Airline	Code	Certificate	Role
Lion Air	JT	DGCA, Indonesia	Low-cost jets, domestic and regional
Batik Air	ID	DGCA, Indonesia	Full-service, own page
Wings Air	IW	DGCA, Indonesia	ATR turboprops to small airports
Super Air Jet	IU	DGCA, Indonesia	Low-cost Airbus jets, since 2021
Thai Lion Air	SL	CAAT, Thailand	Low-cost 737s from Bangkok Don Mueang
Batik Air Malaysia	OD	CAAM, Malaysia	On the Batik Air page

Wings Air flights are often sold as JT or IW codeshares; the ATR you board is a Wings Air aircraft. In early 2023 the group as a whole had 317 aircraft, 111 of them at Lion Air itself, according to ch-aviation.

What happened on JT610?

On 29 October 2018, JT610 took off from Jakarta for Pangkal Pinang. The Boeing 737 MAX 8, PK-LQP, had been in service for ten weeks. The day before, engineers in Denpasar had fitted a replacement angle-of-attack sensor that had been mis-calibrated during an earlier repair in the US. On the next flight, JT43 to Jakarta, the stick shaker fired on take-off and the nose trimmed down three times; that crew cut out the stabiliser trim and landed. But the stick shaker and the trim cut-out were not written into the maintenance log, so the Jakarta engineers worked on something else and released the aircraft.

On JT610, a new Boeing system called MCAS, relying on that single faulty sensor, pushed the nose down again and again. The crew fought it for about ten minutes before the jet hit the sea. KNKT's final report, released in October 2019, listed nine contributing factors. Most concerned Boeing's design and the FAA's certification of MCAS, but it also faulted Lion Air: no calibration record for the sensor installation, a maintenance log that left out the previous night's events, and crew performance in manual handling and teamwork that had shown up in training before. Four months later an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crashed the same way, and the type was grounded worldwide.

A long record of runway accidents

JT610 is not the only reason for the low score. Lion Air's other serious accidents, all from the Aviation Safety Network database, are mostly landings that went wrong:

• Solo, 30 November 2004. An MD-82 landed in a storm with a tailwind above its limit, aquaplaned and overran into a cemetery wall, killing 25 of 163.
• Written-off jets since 2006: MD-82 at Surabaya (2006), 737-400 at Makassar (2006), two MD-90s at Batam and Jakarta (2009), 737-400 at Pontianak (2010), and 737-800 at Bali (2013), where the jet descended below minimums into a rain cloud and hit the sea short of the runway. All 108 people on the Bali flight survived.
• Runway excursionsRunway excursionWhen an aircraft leaves the runway surface during take-off or landing, either off the end (an overrun) or off the side (a veer-off).More in the glossary at Gorontalo (2018) and Pontianak (2019), both on landing in rain, and at Bandar Lampung (2020) while backtracking on the runway, and a runway collision with a Wings Air ATR at Medan in 2017.

There has been no fatal crash and no lost aircraft since 2018. A passenger died after falling on the stairs while leaving a parked Lion Air A330 at Madinah in October 2024, on a charter for Flynas. A fall at the stand is outside the ICAO Annex 13 accident definition, so we do not count it.

Is Lion Air better now?

Some things have changed. Lion Air is now an IATA member, which means it passes an IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit every two years, and Indonesian airlines came off the EU's banned list in 2018. The pace of serious incidents has slowed since 2021. Against that, Indonesia's regulator is not on the FAA's current IASAFAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary list, the group had about a quarter of its aircraft parked in May 2025 according to a fleet-tracker count. Our score looks back 20 years, so JT610 will weigh on it for a long time.

How to fly Lion Air more safely

• Check the operator. A JT ticket may be flown by Wings Air, Batik Air or Super Air Jet.
• Prefer daytime flights in the wet season on routes into short runways such as Pontianak or Gorontalo; most excursions came in heavy rain.
• Keep your belt fastened and your bag stowed. In an evacuation, leave it.

How we scored it

The accident record (45) is the main reason for the score, and serious incidents (52) add to it. Oversight (66) gains from IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary but carries Indonesia's regulator history. Compare Garuda Indonesia at 70 and Batik Air, Lion's full-service sister.