The Indonesian Tycoons Behind Lion Air, Whose Plane Crashed Off Jakarta on Monday

 On Monday morning, a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 plunged into the sea 13 minutes after takeoff from the capital Jakarta with 189 people on board. So far 24 body bags have been taken to a hospital in East Jakarta. The budget airline's Chief Executive, Edward Sirait, told Indonesian media that the plane had had a technical problem on a previous flight, but was later repaired and was reported to be ready to fly. Lion Air announced in a press release that it had flown 168 affected family members to Jakarta, and some arrived at the hospital for Victim Identification. The cause of the accident has not yet been determined.

Rusdi Kirana, co-founder of Lion Air. Photographer: Bryan van der Beek / Bloomberg

Rusdi Kirana, co-founder of Lion Air. Photographer: Bryan van der Beek / Bloomberg

Operating for the first time in 2000, Lion Air, the country's largest private airline, is owned by Indonesian tycoons Rusdi and Kusnan Kirana. According to Forbes estimates, the brothers ' combined fortune is about $ 520 million, down from 9 970 million a year ago. The drop is due to a weakened Indonesian rupiah, a drop in the value of similar publicly traded regional airlines and reports that Lion Air is currently unprofitable. The company did not comment on whether it is making a profit or not.

The budget airline, which the brothers founded in 1999 with 9 900,000, has had safety issues before. It was added to the European Union blacklist of banned carriers in July 2007, according to the Air Safety Network, which removed the airline from the list in June 2016. In total, Aviation Safety has recorded 10 Lion Air-related accidents since 2002. The deadliest accident killed 25 people in 2014. Both the Kirana brothers and The Lion Air spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

This is Indonesia's first major plane crash in almost four years. One of Lion Air's big regional rivals is Air Asia, controlled by Malaysian tycoon Tony Fernandes, whose Indonesian subsidiary flight 8501 crashed in December 2014, killing all 162 people on board.

Brothers come from modest roots. Rusdi, now 55, started out as a typewriter and baking ingredients salesman before helping his brother run a travel agency, helping travelers with visas, passports and ground handling at airports. He also waved name boards to pick up passengers arriving at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.

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They improvised enough money to rent their first Boeing 737-300 in 1999. With limited capital at the time, Rusdi designed the airline logo and stewardess uniforms himself. Both are still in use today. Lion Air, whose motto is "we make people fly", eventually became Indonesia's largest airline by number of passengers flown and fleet size. Since 2011, Rusdi has committed to spend $ 58 billion to acquire hundreds of aircraft to expand Lion's reach, including 280 Boeing and 234 Airbus aircraft. His brother, Kusnan, is still involved in the business, but is apparently not active in everyday operations.

Rusdi is the best known and much more public figure behind the business. He is vice president of the National Awakening Party (PKB) of the Indonesian Muslim party and ambassador to Malaysia. As a Christian in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, his move to join PKB in 2014 drew attention. "As a businessman, I need access to decision makers, and it's hard to get that if I wasn't associated with a political party," Rusdi explained in a Forbes interview in 2015.

In that same interview, Rusdi described his bold ambitions for his airline, which included a major IPO that he hoped would raise 8 800 million. It never happened, and it is believed that the Kirana brothers still own the airline. They also own and operate Wings Air, Batik Air, Lion Bizjet, Malindo Air based in Malaysia and Thai Lion Air based in Thailand.

"We have a population of 250 million, 17,000 islands, with 5,000 miles in a straight line from East to West, but fewer seats available per kilometer compared to other Asian countries in the region. We still have a great space to grow," Rusdi said in his 2015 interview. After the most recent accident, it seems that they have a lot to fix this time.

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