Indonesian airliner missing.

[corsair67]

Source: Reuters

Search continues for plane carrying 102
By Jerry Norton in Jakarta
January 02, 2007.


INDONESIA focused rescue efforts on Sulawesi island today after an Adam Air Boeing 737-400 plane went missing with 96 passengers and six crew on board.

The plane lost contact with the ground overnight about an hour before it was due to land in Manado in North Sulawesi, Tatang Ikhsan, director general at the transport ministry, said. It had been flying at 35,000 feet (10,670 metres).

An official said efforts to reach the co-pilot by mobile telephone indicated the plane was on the ground rather than in the sea, where the telephone would be unlikely to work.

"There was a ring tone, but no answer," said Abdul Gani, a Search and Rescue duty officer at Makassar, capital of the region from where a distress signal was picked up by satellite.

Speaking to Reuters by telephone, Mr Gani said the signal indicated the plane might be in a mountainous area. Air and sea searches would begin in the morning, he said.

Mr Ikhsan said the flight had originated in Jakarta, taken off from a stopover in Surabaya on Java island at 1 pm (5pm AEDT) and been scheduled to land just over two hours later in Manado.

At a news conference overnight he said the satellite, in Singapore, had dectected the distress signal 83 nautical miles (154 km) northwest of Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province, 1400 km east of Jakarta.

"We call on other flights which crossed this route to provide information on any distress signal," he said.

Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa said the plane had been sighted by another plane above the Mamuju forest on Sulawesi.

"Let's hope it made an emergency landing," he told Elshinta radio, adding that rescuers had been sent to the area.

At Jakarta's main commercial airport, where the flight began its journey, taxi driver Oswald Mamalani told Reuters 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. "So far I feel that my sister is still alive."

First Marshal Eddy Suyanto, commander of Hasanuddin air base in Makassar, told Metro television: "We have contacted related agencies and several groups have travelled by road to locations where we think the plane might have gone down but so far there has not been any information."

Mr Ikhsan said the plane was airworthy and was last serviced in December 2005. It has 45,371 flying hours.

"The weather conditions all over our country are not very good. We have notified all airlines... All flights should have received complete information," he said.

Much of Indonesia was cloudy with rainfall yesterday.

An Adam Air Boeing 737-300 plane was forced to make an emergency landing in February at a small airport in East Nusa Tenggara province after a navigational failure caused the pilot to lose contact with the destination airport in Makassar.

Adam Air, one of about a dozen budget airlines in the world's fourth most populous nation, operates 19 Boeing 737 jets. It serves dozens of domestic routes in Indonesia and also flies to Singapore.

The airline was established by two Indonesians, Agung Laksono, the speaker of the house of representatives, who is chairman of the company, and Sandra Ang, in 2002 and commenced operations on Dec. 19, 2003.

In January a newspaper report said Adam Air was planning a share listing in Singapore for 2008.

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.


Additional reporting by Muhamad Ari, Telly Nathalia, Ahmad Pathoni, Harry Suhartono and Yoga Rusmana

[corsair67]

Source: NEWS.com.au

12 survivors in plane wreck - report
By staff reporters and wires
January 02, 2007.

THE wreckage of an Indonesian passenger jet carrying 102 people has been found in a mountainous region of Sulawesi island.

The Associated Press reported that 12 survivors had been found among the smoldering wreckage.

The other 90 people aboard were killed, according to Adam Air spokesman Hartono, who goes by a single name.

The Boeing 737-400 went down in a storm yesterday between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sulawesi.

The plane took off yesterday at 12.59pm (4.59pm AEDT) from the city of Surabaya on Java bound for Manado in northeast Sulawesi but disappeared from radar screens about halfway through the flight.

A total of 96 passengers - including 11 children - and six crew were aboard the plane.

A copy of the missing plane's manifest showed three passengers were not Indonesian, but did not indicate their nationalities.

Consular officials are investigating whether any Australian citizens were onboard.

The Surabaya airport duty manager had said there were no technical problems with the plane when it took off.

Air Transport Department director general Mohammad Iksan Tatang said they lost contact with the plane about an hour after it took off.

"We had lost contact and the plane had disappeared from radar at Makassar (in South Sulawesi) at 0707 GMT. It had lost contact at that position and disappeared from the screen,'' he said.

Mr Tatang said he did not know what had happened but pointed out that the weather had been bad in recent days.

"`We don't know for sure, but the weather in this region has been really bad, but before the plane took off they were fully aware of the weather conditions,'' Mr Tatang said.

The area north of east Java has been subject to violent storms, with high winds since last weekend.

The sinking of a ferry carrying 600 people off Java on Friday night has been blamed on bad weather.

Aircraft accidents are not rare in Indonesia, a vast archipelago nation stretching over 5000km.

Public and private Indonesian airlines have been repeatedly criticised over their poor safety records, repeated delays and bad management.

Privately owned Adam Air began operations in 2003 and serves mostly domestic routes, with Singapore and Malaysia's Penang its only international destinations.

The company is a leading low-cost carrier in the competitive Indonesian market, marketing itself as a "boutique airline'' placed between traditional budget firms and regular airlines.

Company president director Adam Suherman said in November that Adam Air planned to beef up its fleet by an extra 10 planes in 2007 to handle a projected rise in passenger numbers.

According to Adam Air's website, the carrier had 19 Boeing 737 jets in its fleet as of January 2006.

The airline expected to handle 11 million passengers in 2007, up from an estimated seven million in 2006.

Mr Suherman had said the carrier would concentrate on its domestic market, which is still largely untapped.

- AFP, AAP

[corsair67]

One minute they saying they've found the wreckage, next minute they saying they haven't?

From The Australian.


Search in jungle for air crash survivors
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta correspondent
January 03, 2007.

RESCUE workers were struggling through mountainous jungle on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi last night in a frantic search for survivors of a passenger jet that crashed with 102 people on board.

Following claims, later denied, that wreckage and at least a dozen survivors had been found, the country's latest air disaster was quickly becoming a political storm, with calls for Adam Air, the company founded three years ago by parliamentary speaker Agung Laksono, to be grounded.
"By way of punishment, Adam Air's operations must be stopped and the suitability of all other operators' flights must be checked," said Marwan Ja'afar of the national parliamentary committee responsible for air safety.

The Boeing 737-400 went down in an inaccessible region of south Sulawesi on Monday afternoon, en route from Jakarta to the North Sulawesi capital of Manado. Radio contact was lost during heavy rain shortly after takeoff from a transit stop in Surabaya, east Java, but two distress signals were sent before the plane crashed.

But Mr Marwan said it was not enough to blame seasonal monsoons for the tragedy, since safety checks and practices were also often not carried out properly in Indonesia's air sector.

Three Americans, Scott Jackson and his two daughters, Lindsay and Stephanie, were reported to have been aboard the plane. Other passengers included two new graduates from Indonesia's police academy, Pungky and Novi Hendrayanto, on their way to begin their first postings at north Sulawesi's provincial police headquarters.

Initial reports said the plane's wreckage was found on Monday afternoon, shortly after the jet crashed at 4pm local time, but this was dismissed last night.

A 24-hour delay in reporting the plane as missing was put down to atrocious weather conditions and poor communications. "There have been heavy rains and wild winds," Chief Commissioner for Parepare district Genot Haryanto said. "The information was slow getting out because of difficult conditions on the ground."

Rescue official Wahyudi Suparman said team members arrived in the region yesterday afternoon "but access is very difficult".

There were frantic scenes at the plane's intended destination of Manado as news of the tragedy sank in to distraught relatives and friends of passengers and a priest conducted group prayers.

The disaster follows a string of calamities at sea, with bodies of victims from a ferry sinking north of Java continuing to be recovered yesterday.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered Transport Minister Hatta Radjasa to establish how many passenger ships were equipped with modern communications equipment and capable of surviving heavy seas, with any deemed not up to scratch to be confined to port.

Adam Air emerged in 2003 from massive air industry deregulation in Indonesia, a process that has also been held responsible for an appalling safety record, with several passenger craft lost in recent years.

Vice-President Yussuf Kalla admitted yesterday that continuing accidents were tarnishing the industry but denied that standards were being compromised for the sake of profits.

The doomed flight's 47-year-old pilot, Refri Agustian Widodo, had worked since 1980 for the former government-owned domestic carrier Merpati Airlines, joining Adam just three months ago.

As the nation mourned its latest catastrophe, a Lion Air flight to Maluku, in the country's east, overshot the runway by 8m on landing yesterday morning.

The McDonnell Douglas 90, carrying 115 passengers, was able to continue on its way to Ujung Pandang in Sulawesi after the incident, which was attributed to heavy rains. No one was injured in the incident.

[corsair67]

This story just keeps getting weirder and weirder!

From The Australian.



Indonesia air loss mystery deepens
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta correspondent
January 04, 2007.

FOUL weather forced search and rescue teams out of the skies yesterday as the mystery deepened over what became of Adam Air Flight KI 574, the budget jet that disappeared between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sulawesi on Monday with 102 people on board.

Equally baffling was how the Boeing 737-400's wreckage was erroneously reported discovered, complete with 12 survivors, by villagers in a mountainous region of West Sulawesi on Tuesday.

Rescue teams dispatched to the area trekked for 10 hours along mud-soaked trails only to find a furious village chief who denied having alerted authorities to the plane crash.

Transport Minister Hatta Radjasa, fending off accusations of incompetence and calls for his resignation, blamed the early incorrect information on the head of Lanud Hasanuddin airport in Makassar, South Sulawesi.

Airport chief Eddy Suyanto was caught on the hop delivering the latest crash position updates to national search and rescue co-ordinators, and inadvertently let slip the location when quizzed by reporters, Mr Radjasa said.

However, no one was prepared to explain why the information was not checked in the first place, with the effective loss of at least a full day's search time. The search was widened to include the Makassar strait on the assumption pilot Refri Agustian Widodo might have sought a safe route around a dangerously large cumulonimbus cloud mass and 40-knot wind gusts.

Mr Suyanto said nothing had been found and military search aircraft had been grounded as monsoonal storms worsened.

An irritated President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono summoned the key players to a crisis meeting in Jakarta last night, including Mr Radjasa, who was forced to return from his damage-control holding position in Makassar.

"The Government has lied to the people. Hatta must be investigated," said Rendry Lamajidu, a senior member of the national parliamentary committee on transportation.

As well as the time wasted trekking to the wrong location, the long delay in launching a search for the jet when it first disappeared from radar screens shortly after 3pm local time (6pm AEST) on Monday was a crucial failure, Mr Lamajidu said.

"There were no direct efforts in the first 24 hours, when there could still have been passengers to save. Now it's not possible there's anyone left," he said.

Upper house Speaker Hidayat Nurwahid conceded human error was probably responsible for a string of transport disasters in recent days, including the capsize of a ferry north of Java with the loss of hundreds of lives, but cautioned against laying all the blame on the minister.

"It's not entirely his fault," Mr Nurwahid said, as he called for a thorough investigation into the transport sector. Deregulation of the Indonesian airline industry in 1999 produced a host of low-cost, low-quality carriers, notorious for their poor service and safety and more akin to long-haul bus travel than normal airlines.

But aeronautics professor Djoko Sardjadi of the Bandung Institute of Technology said the excessive age of most of Indonesia's fleet of Boeing 737s - many between 20 and 25 years old - should not be a problem "so long as we understand that the planes are old and they are not forced beyond their operating limits".

[corsair67]

Well, they're bound to find it sooner or later?

I don't think the age of the jet has much to do with things - it's more how well it's been maintained.


Villager saw doomed Indonesian jet go down
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta correspondent
January 05, 2007.

INDONESIAN search and rescue teams were last night scrambling to investigate reports from a mountainous region in the west of Sulawesi that a passenger jet with 102 people on board crashed in the area on Monday.

Emergency services combing the island and surrounding waters had been treating potential sightings with extreme caution, after a false alarm on Tuesday sent rescuers in the wrong direction.
However, police were taking seriously the claim by a woman in Mamasa district, directly under the plane's flight path from Surabaya in east Java to Manado in North Sulawesi, that she saw an aircraft pass low over her village and disappear behind mountains, before hearing a loud explosion.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered the search for Flight KI574 to continue "for the maximum period".

An improvement in the weather allowed airborne searches to resume yesterday. A Singaporean plane joined the hunt, along with two Indonesian aircraft, four warships with underwater mine detection capabilities and thousands of troops and police. There were no plans for Australian aid in the search, although the US has offered help, which Dr Yudhoyono welcomed.

The President also said search teams were to continue their hunt for the wreckage of the passenger ferry Senopati Nusantara, which capsized a week ago with the loss of more than 400 lives.

It is believed high waves washing into the car deck of the ferry caused the ship to capsize.

"I suspect waves entered the car deck over the door and became trapped, making the vessel too heavy and unstable," said Ruth Simatupang, a government investigator.

Indonesians were celebrating yesterday the rescue from that tragedy of 12 people, including the captain and a six-year-old boy, who were found clinging to an oil rig off the northern Java coast. Fifteen others were found on an island off Java, bringing the total rescued to 220.

However, the possibility of finding survivors from the Adam Air crash has now almost completely faded.

Aviation experts yesterday speculated the plane could have broken up in mid-air as a result of a mechanical or other failure causing a sudden dive that pushed the aircraft past its ageing fuselage's speed tolerance.

But search co-ordinator Eddy Suyanto, head of South Sulawesi's Makassar airport and the man responsible for a disastrous mistake on Tuesday when rescue teams headed in the wrong direction based on rumours, dismissed the claim yesterday.

"I think an explosion would have made it easier to find evidence," he said, because debris would be spread across a wide area. "Even if it happened over the ocean, after a couple of days you would be finding corpses."

News site www.detik.com pointed to what many see as a major failing in Indonesia's deregulated budget airline market, revealing Adam Air was the eighth owner of the 20-year-old Boeing 737-400.

[corsair67]

Finally, the mystery has been solved in this very sad case.

(I feel like the Grim Reaper, as lately the only stories I seem to be posting are aviation tragedy related items! )

Source: Reuters


Indonesian plane part and body found
From correspondents in Makassar, Indonesia
January 11, 2007.

PART of the tail of an Indonesian plane that disappeared with 102 people on board 10 days ago had been found in the sea off Sulawesi island, an air base commander said today.

Police said later that search teams had found a woman's body floating in the same general area.

The ill-fated Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was heading from Surabaya in Central Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather on January 1.

"This morning I announced that there has been a finding of a part of Adam Air. What was found was the right tail's stabiliser number 65C25746-76. This thing was found by a fisherman in Pare Pare," said Eddy Suyanto, who has been coordinating search efforts from an air base in the South Sulawesi capital, Makassar.

"This object has the same number as the Boeing catalogue," he said, displaying the slightly scratched white stabiliser found yesterday.

A police official told Reuters that a female body had been recovered from the sea.

"She had short black hair. She wore green attire, long brown trousers. She had typical dark Asian skin," police official Simon Benteng said by telephone from Pare Pare, a seaside town about 100km north of Makassar.

He estimated that the woman was in her 30s and said neither her identity nor whether she was a passenger on the Adam Air plane had been confirmed.

Pare Pare is about 150km south of Mamuju in west Sulawesi, the main focus of the hunt since Monday when Indonesian ships detected large metal objects deep on the sea bed.

A US navy oceanographic ship, the USNS Mary Sears, joined the search effort earlier but has yet to shed light on whether the metal objects are wreckage.

"Up until now I have not received any reports from Mary Sears," Mr Suyanto said.

Moekhlas Sidik, commander of the navy's eastern fleet, had said yesterday the Mary Sears confirmed the findings of metal objects at three points and was focusing on one of the sites.

The objects lay at a depth of 1700m and, while the US vessel could map the sea bed, the US Naval Oceanographic Office said it had its limits.

"In shallow water that's not too difficult to do, in less than 500 metres. Any deeper ... and it will be very difficult for our ship to identify any parts, especially if they're small," Mark Jarrett, deputy director of operations for the US Naval Oceanographic Office, said.

[turboNZ]

Very sad . Saw the piece of wreckage on the news tonight.