“Four of our personnel were escorting the funds”, said Haryono, the head of Jayapura post office.
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Indonesian rescue officials said Monday that search and rescue teams had identified the wreckage of the twin turboprop plane that disappeared in bad weather in the province of Papua.
The Trigana Air crash is the latest air accident in Indonesia, which has a poor aviation safety record and has suffered major incidents recently, including the crash of an AirAsia plane in December with the loss of 162 lives, AFP reported.
Local officials said the weather was just fine when the plane took off, but CNN meteorologist Ivan Cabrera said there were several thunderstorms starting to form over a mountainous area on the plane’s path. “Verification is still in process”, said the transport ministry’s director-general of air transportation, Suprasetyo.
About 10 aircraft are involved in the search and rescue, but operations were stopped as darkness fell Monday and will restart early Tuesday, said Heronimus Guru, deputy operations director of the National Search and Rescue Agency, according to the AP.
“The area is steep and is covered by dense forests…”
Indonesia has had its share of airline woes in recent years.
A plane was sent Sunday to look for the missing airliner, but the search was suspended due to darkness and limited visibility and will resume Monday morning, Susanto said.
Officials believe the debris is from a Trigana Air flight that crashed with 54 people on board.
The plane lost contact with air traffic control in the country’s remote Papua region, on Sunday. Trigana has a fleet of 14 aircraft, with an average age of 26.6 years, according to the airfleets.com database.
A man walks into the entrance of Trigana Air’s office in Jakarta, Indonesia August 16, 2015.
Barata said officials have not yet confirmed whether the plane crashed. In 2007, the European Commission added Trigana to its list of airlines banned “because they are found to be unsafe and/or they are not sufficiently overseen by their authorities”.
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This plane crash is already one of the many plane crash incidents which happened recently in South East Asia. In June, more than 100 people died when a military plane crashed into a residential neighborhood in Medan, Indonesia’s third-largest city.
