An investigation flight early on Monday discovered the wreckage of an airliner that disappeared Sunday in an isolated, mountainous location of Indonesia with 54 individuals aboard.
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Officials confirmed Tuesday that there had been no survivors from the Trigana Air Service flight that crashed Sunday around 7 miles from an airport in Oksibil – a remote settlement near the border with Papua New Guinea.
It took rescuers two days to reach the site which is about 15 kilometres from Oksibil; their initial efforts were hindered by the rough terrain, thick fog and heavy rain.
The data they contain could help explain what caused the Trigana Air Service plane to crash.
Police have prepared Bhayangkara hospital in Papua capital city of Jayapura to store the bodies for further identification process carried out by the their Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team. There are are no banks to transfer or withdraw money in some districts of Papua province.
Authorities also revealed rescuers were still looking for one of the Trigana Air plane’s two “black boxes”, the flight data recorder, after initially saying that both had been found.
The plane, carrying 49 passengers and five crew members, departed from Sentani Airport in Jayapura at 2:21 p.m. local time and then lost contact with air traffic control about half an hour later.
A team of three investigators from France’s BEA agency, which probes air accidents, has headed to Indonesia along with four technical advisers from ATR, a European plane-maker based in France, to look into the accident.
The National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) on Tuesday claimed the aircraft had passed its most recent airworthiness test. But on Wednesday he said officials had misinterpreted reports from rescuers at the scene.
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Indonesia airways, no stranger to airline tragedies, has been prevented prior to now from flying in Europe due to its poor security requirements.
