Indonesia crash: no survivors
August 18, 2015
The plane which went down Sunday in bad weather during a short flight from the capital of Papua province, Jayapura, to the remote city of Oksibil in the mountains, was found “completely destroyed”, officials said.
The plane was carrying 49 passengers, including five children, and five crew members. All the bodies were found among the wreckage when rescuers finally reached the remote crash site Tuesday after being hampered by treacherous terrain and bad weather.
Search and rescue chief Bambang Soelistyo said: "The plane was totally destroyed and all the bodies were burned and difficult to identify.
"Everything was in pieces and part of the plane is burnt. We could see burn marks on some pieces.”
Soelistyo said that the plane's black box has also been recovered. The black box contains data on the plane's operations and may shed some light on the exact cause of the crash.
Photos of the site show a clearing in a thick forest that appears to be blackened by fire and scattered with debris.
Soelistyo said 54 bodies have been recovered and will be taken to Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, so that they can be identified.
Plane could have 'hit a mountain'
Officials have declined to comment on the cause of Sunday's crash until they receive the results of an investigation by the national transport safety committee, but Major-General Heronimus Guru, operations director at Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, said the terrain in Indonesia's easternmost province could have been a factor.
"There's a possibility the aircraft hit a peak and then fell into a ravine because the place that it was found is steep," he said.
The Trigana plane on a scheduled 42-minute flight lost contact with air traffic control about 10 minutes before reaching its remote destination Oksibil, soon after the crew requested permission to start descending in heavy cloud and rain to land.
There is still no news on the fate of the 6.5 billion rupiahs ($470,000) that were being transported by the plane in cash, intended to be distributed to poor families as social assistance funds.
Indonesia's poor aviation history
The disaster is the latest air accident in Indonesia, which has a poor aviation safety record and has suffered major disasters in recent months. These include the crash of an AirAsia plane in December with the loss of 162 lives.
Trigana Air, a small domestic Indonesian airline, is banned from flying in European Union airspace after experiencing a string of serious incidents.
The aviation sector in Indonesia is expanding rapidly, but airlines are struggling to find enough well-trained staff to keep up with the rapid growth in the archipelago of more than 17,000 islands.
mh/jil (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)