The Jakarta Post reported that efforts to recover the 54 bodies of plane crash victims in Papua have been delayed because of thick cloud covering the location.
Advertisement
They also recovered one of the plane’s black box flight data recorders, and some of the billions of Rupiah (US$470,000) in government social assistance funds that was being transported for distribution to poor families.
The first bodies of 54 people killed when a plane went down in eastern Indonesia were Wednesday carried from the remote crash site after bad weather hampered efforts to airlift them.
“There were four people carrying the money”, PT Pos spokesman Abu Sofjan said yesterday.
The Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 plane crashed on Sunday, the latest in a string of aviation disasters in the sprawling South-East Asian archipelago.
Oksibil, about 175 miles south of Jayapura, was experiencing heavy rain, strong winds and fog when the plane lost contact with the airport minutes before it was scheduled to land.
When rescuers reached the crash site two days later, they found the twin-turboprop aircraft in pieces scattered across a fire-blackened clearing, and the bodies of the 49 passengers and five crew who had been aboard.
Smoke was yet billowing from the wreckage while it had been discovered by a flight explore, stated Soelistyo that is chief of the rescue operations from Sentani Airport terminal in Jayapura, including that bad weather and also rough landscape were hampering hard work to get to the wreckage situated in a cliffy region at an altitude of around 8,500 ft.
A team of three investigators from France’s BEA agency, which probes air accidents, and four technical advisors from ATR, a European plane maker based in France, is heading to Indonesia to look into the accident.
Rescuers have found the money, which was partly scorched, and will hand it over to the authorities, Soelistyo said.
Advertisement
Indonesia airways, no stranger to airline tragedies, has been prevented prior to now from flying in Europe due to its poor security requirements.
