T

he Transportation Ministry has dismissed as "insignificant" loose screws, broken lights and other technical flaws found in several of the 21 passenger planes it checked on Thursday.

"The flaws found were insignificant," Yurlis Hasibuan, airworthy certification director at the Transportation Ministry's air transportation directorate general, told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

"According to our standards, those planes are airworthy."

The country has experienced a slew of aircraft accidents in the past few years. In 2007, 10 such incidents occurred, prompting the European Commission to ban all Indonesian airlines from EU airspace.

The deadliest accident involved a Boeing 737-400 belonging to the now defunct Adam Air, which went missing on its way to Manado, North Sulawesi, from Surabaya, East Java on Jan. 1 last year.

Yurlis said his office on Thursday checked 21 planes belonging to low-cost airlines such as Mandala, Sriwijaya Air, Lion Air and Batavia Air at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Jakarta.

The inspection team found several technical faults such as loose screws on a Lion Air plane's underbelly.

"The screws were immediately screwed back into place, to prevent metal slabs from coming off the plane's underside," he said.

Last year, six metal slabs from a Batavia Air plane fell and damaged roofs in Tangerang, Banten province, during its flight.

Thursday's inspection also revealed broken emergency lights meant to guide passengers to the plane's exits.

The team also found several planes with malfunctioning auxiliary power units.

"Any malfunction of this unit will force the plane to use ground power for takeoff.

"This will need to be fixed within 10 days or the plane will have to be grounded," Yurlis explained.

He added some of the planes that were checked Thursday had been used for more than 20 years, especially the Boeing 737-200 types.

Boeing 737 planes feature prominently in the litany of Indonesian aircraft accidents.

Besides the 2007 Adam Air case, a Boeing 737 belonging to the country's flag carrier Garuda Indonesia crash-landed in Yogyakarta in March that same year, killing 21 passengers.

The latest Boeing 737 case was the emergency landing of a Sriwijaya Air plane at Hang Nadim Airport in Batam, its journey cut short by engine failure.

Transportation Minister Jusman Syafii Djamal commented earlier this week that the ministry had advised Sriwijaya to replace its outdated Boeing 737-200 planes with newer models before the accident occurred.