The tragic photo that puts the humanity behind the story of Lion Air's plane crash.

The Indonesian Lion Air crash was an unbelievable tragedy.

Just 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta’s international airport, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 lost contact with ground staff and crashed into the sea off Tanjung Karawang, 70 kilometres east of Jakarta.

Out of the confirmed 189 passengers, including three children, no survivors have been found.

Divers searching for the wreckage of Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 can no longer hear a signal from the aircraft’s missing cockpit voice recorder, the head of Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency says https://t.co/48r6aY66QA pic.twitter.com/vulyHjWPQW

— CNN (@CNN) November 4, 2018

Indonesian divers have found the main wreckage of Lion Air Flight 610 that crashed Monday killing all 189 aboard, and also say they can hear the signal from the aircraft’s missing cockpit voice recorder. https://t.co/kSiaMsx3zI #7News pic.twitter.com/Fvk6zAJwrL

— 7 News Melbourne (@7NewsMelbourne) November 4, 2018

Indonesian police hospital’s Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) unit has identified 14 bodies of passengers and crew members on board of the crashed Lion Air plane. #LionAirJT610 #rescue #LionAir pic.twitter.com/o8RBy8fES9

— XinhuaNet NA (@XinhuaNetNA) November 4, 2018

Although it’s easy to recognise the obvious disaster of a plane crash, when the story is reduced to a headline or a body count, it becomes just another tragedy in the news cycle – one we briefly interact with while driving the kids to school, or scrolling through Facebook on the bus.

But these two photos taken by AAP photographer, Bagus Indahono, tear us away from the headlines, and force us to look at the real human loss behind them.

The images show officials removing the recovered possessions of the passengers of Lion Air flight JT610, as they're about to be loaded onto a truck for further investigation by the National Transportation Safety Committee.

Among the debris there's a pair of Nike running shoes, similar to the ones that might be sitting in your hallway, a purple and blue polka-dot backpack, that looks as if it belonged to one of the three children on the plane, and an empty Fuji Film bag, missing the camera it was meant to protect.

As humans, there's an automatic, empathetic response that comes from seeing the eerie familiarity of a stranger's material possessions, especially when they represent unfinished stories, and lives senselessly stopped short. There's an incredible injustice in a person's shoes being sorted by strangers - their presence surpassing the person who once wore them.

The chances of being a victim of an airline crash sits somewhere between one in 5.4 million to one in 11 million, and yet, these photos remind us that this figure means absolutely nothing when it's your parent, child, friend or loved one, who never reached their destination.

Were you moved by the above two photos? Tell us in a comment below.