On Sunday, after losing contact with ground control, an
Indonesian airliner went missing over the country’s easternmost province of
Papua, a remote and mountainous region, the Associated Press reports.
Officials said the Trigana Air Service lost contact with
ground control during a short flight from Papua’s provincial capital of
Jayapura to the city of Oksibil. Transportation Ministry spokesman Julius Barata said there was no indication that the pilot had made a distress call.
According to the AP, locals told authorities that they had
seen a plane crash into a mountain.
- An air search for the plane was suspended due to darkness and will resume Monday morning.
- Barata said that the plane was an ATR42-300 twin turboprop plane carrying 49 passengers and five crew members. Five children were among the passengers, he said, including three infants.
- NBC News reports that there are conflicting reports over when exactly contact with the plane was lost:
- One BASARNAS official told NBC News that the airliner lost contact at 2:55 p.m — before it was due to arrive.
- However, local BASARNAS search and rescue officer Raymond Konstantin told NBC News that air traffic control said the plane last made contact at 3:21 local time — after it was due on the ground — saying it was unable to land due to poor visibility. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.
Aviation analyst Gerry Soejatman told The Guardian that it
was likely the missing plane had crashed, given the amount of fuel it was
carrying and the time it had been missing. “If it has not landed somewhere now,
it has crashed somewhere, that’s for sure.”
“It’s mountainous, very remote and the airfield runways are
sometimes on the side of a hill so it is not really an area for the
faint- hearted to fly,” Soejatman
said.
“There are bound to be accidents.”
faint- hearted to fly,” Soejatman
said.
“There are bound to be accidents.”
Source: Agencies
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