(Reuters)
2 January 2007
JAKARTA - Indonesia’s air force spotted the wreckage of a missing passenger plane with 102 people on board on Tuesday in a mountainous region of Sulawesi, the second transport disaster this week in the sprawling archipelago.
“The plane’s location has been found and 12 people from the 102 people on board have survived,” said airline spokesman Hartono, who goes by one name. “We are going to evacuate them to Makassar,” he said, referring to South Sulawesi’s provincial capital.
Ninety people were killed in the Adam Air crash, the second transport disaster this week in the sprawling archipelago. A copy of the plane’s manifest showed three passengers as non-Indonesians, but did not indicate their nationalities.
”They say the victims would be moved to Makassar but I could not find out anything about my relatives,” said Lely Jasman, 41, who was among a crowd of anxious relatives awaiting information from the Adam Air office at Makassar airport.
“Hopefully, they are among the 12 people I heard had survived,” said the civil servant from Makassar, whose uncle and cousin were on the plane.
No airline official was available for comment in Makassar.
First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, commander of Hasanuddin air base in Makassar, told Radio Elshinta an air force plane had spotted the wreckage of the Boeing 737-400.
“The plane was found around 20 kilometres from Polewali (town) in the mountains. The weather is clear,” Suyanto said.
The crash site is a five-hour drive through rough terrain from Polewali. Officials said local villagers have reached the area and rescue teams were on the way.
Blackbox search
Setyo Rahardjo, head of Indonesia’s national transport safety committee, told Reuters experts also have been sent to find the plane’s blackbox.
“I have formed a team that are on their way. We want to find the causes. We cannot give any conclusion yet at the moment.”
The disappearance of the plane came two days after the sinking of an Indonesian ferry, around 400 of whose passengers were still unaccounted for on Monday.
The plane lost contact with the ground on Monday about an hour before it was due to land in Manado in North Sulawesi, the transport ministry said.
At Jakarta’s main commercial airport, where the flight began its journey, taxi driver Oswald Mamalani told Reuters after the plane was initially reported missing that his younger sister and her child were aboard the plane.
“When I arrived home, I got a phone call from a relative in Manado asking me to pray ... for the safety of my sister,” he said.
The flight had taken off from a stopover in Surabaya on Java island and was scheduled to land about two hours later in Manado.
The transport ministry said the plane was airworthy and last serviced in December 2005. It had 45,371 flying hours and, according to Adam Air, the 17-year-old aircraft’s engines are CFM56-3C1 models made by General Electric, said Ikhsan Tatang, head of the ministry’s aviation directorate.
An Adam Air Boeing 737-300 plane was forced to make an emergency landing in February after a navigational failure caused the pilot to lose contact with its destination airport.
One of about a dozen budget airlines in the world’s fourth most populous nation, Adam Air operates 19 Boeing 737s. Established in 2002, it serves dozens of domestic routes and also flies to Singapore. In January a newspaper report said Adam Air was planning a share listing in Singapore for 2008.
The airline was established in 2002 by Agung Laksono, the speaker of Indonesia’s house of representatives and chairman of the company, and Sandra Ang. It began operations on Dec. 19, 2003.
Air travel in Indonesia, home to 220 million people, has grown substantially since the liberalisation of the airline industry after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, which enabled privately owned budget airlines to operate.
