Rescue teams race to Indonesian plane crash site
JAYAPURA (AFP) — Rescuers headed yesterday to the site in remote eastern Indonesia where debris has been spotted after a plane crashed with 54 people aboard on Sunday, the latest accident to hit the country’s aviation sector.
The plane operated by Indonesian carrier Trigana Air lost contact with air traffic control on Sunday afternoon during a short flight in bad weather from Jayapura, capital of Papua province.
The ATR 42-300 twin-turboprop plane was carrying 44 adult passengers, five children and five crew on the flight which was scheduled to take about 45 minutes.
But the plane disappeared about 10 minutes before reaching its destination Oksibil, a remote settlement in the mountains south of Jayapura, shortly after it asked permission to start descending to land.
Bambang Soelistyo, head of the search and rescue agency, told reporters in Jayapura that debris engulfed in smoke had been spotted from the air.
The agency said another plane was being sent over the site to check and search and rescue personnel were heading by foot to the mountainous, densely forested area.
It is just the latest air accident in Indonesia, which has a patchy aviation safety record and has suffered major incidents recently, including the crash of an AirAsia plane in December with the loss of 162 lives.
Trigana Air, a small domestic airline, has suffered a string of safety incidents and is banned from flying in European Union airspace.
After the plane failed to land at the weekend, Trigana Air sent another flight over the area to hunt for it but the aircraft failed to spot anything due to bad weather.
Captain Beni Sumaryanto, Trigana Air’s service director of operations, said the area where the plane went missing was mountainous and the weather was “very unpredictable.”