Jane Onyanga-Omara and Thomas Maresca

USA TODAY

Divers, drones and sonar equipment were deployed Tuesday in the recovery operation for the Lion Air plane and the 189 people it was carrying after the aircraft crashed into the Java Sea on Monday, amid reports that it malfunctioned the previous day.

Lion Air said in a statement that rescuers sent 24 body bags to a police hospital in the Indonesian capital Jakarta for identification and that the airline flew more than 180 grieving relatives of those aboard to the capital.

It said the recovery of the passengers, crew and the 2-month-old Boeing plane was ongoing.

Specialist ships and a remotely operated underwater vehicle were searching for the plane’s hull and flight recorder, which authorities believe will not take long to find because of the relatively shallow 115 foot depth of the waters where the plane crashed.

Flight JT 610 took off at 6:20 a.m. local time Monday and crashed just 13 minutes later. The flight was bound for the city of Pangkal Pinang on Bangka – Indonesia's ninth-largest island – when it lost contact.

Its pilot had requested clearance to return to the airport just 2-3 minutes after takeoff, which aviation experts said indicated a technical problem.

The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia’s fast-growing aviation industry, which was recently removed from European Union and U.S. blacklists.

The president of Lion Air, Edward Sirait, told reporters Monday that the plane had a technical issue on its previous flight but said it had been resolved according to the manufacturer’s procedures. He did not provide any specific details on that incident.

Two passengers on the plane’s previous flight from Bali to Jakarta described numerous issues that caused concern.

Indonesian TV presenter Conchita Caroline said in an online post that boarding of the flight Sunday was delayed by more than an hour and when the plane was being towed, a technical problem forced it to return to its parking space.

She said passengers sat in the cabin without air conditioning for at least 30 minutes listening to an “unusual” engine roar, while some children vomited from the heat, until staff faced with rising anger let them disembark.

After about 30 minutes of passengers waiting on the tarmac, they were told to board again while an engine was checked.

Caroline said she queried a staff member but was met with a defensive response.

“He just showed me the flight permit that he had signed and said he said the problem had been settled,” she said. “He treated me like a passenger full of disturbing dramas even though what I was asking represented friends and confused tourists who didn’t understand Indonesian.”

Another passenger, Alon Soetanto, told TVOne the plane dropped suddenly several times in the first few minutes of its flight.

“About three to eight minutes after it took off, I felt like the plane was losing power and unable to rise. That happened several times during the flight,” he said. “We felt like in a roller coaster. Some passengers began to panic and vomit.”

His account is consistent with data from flight-tracking sites that show erratic speed, altitude and direction in the minutes after takeoff. A similar pattern is also seen in data pinged from Monday’s fatal flight. Safety experts cautioned, however, that the data must be checked for accuracy against the plane’s so-called black boxes.

The Boeing 737 MAX series has only been in commercial operation since 2016, and this is the first crash involving the aircraft, a single-aisle plane used for short-haul flights. The plane, which has a capacity of up to 210 passengers, has received 4,783 orders by airlines, with 219 fulfilled as of September 2018, according to company data.

Lion Air, which was founded in 1999, has had some safety and maintenance issues in the past and was banned from flying into European airspace from 2007 until 2016. The U.S. lifted a decade long ban in 2016. The airline had a crash in 2004 that killed 25 and has had a number of other incidents, including a crash landing in the sea near Bali in which all 108 passengers survived.

The Australian government announced on Monday that it was instructing all government officials and contractors not to fly Lion Air until the findings of the crash investigation are clear.

Contributing: The Associated Press