Indonesian rescuers on Wednesday began transferring bodies of 54 victims to hospital for further identification days after a regional plane crashed in Indonesia’s easternmost province of Papua.
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Earlier, the National Search and Rescue Agency said the twin turboprop ATR-42-300 probably hit a peak on Sunday before crashing into a ravine in the Bintang Mountains district, about seven nautical miles from Oksibil.
Outside of the 54 passengers and crew, the aircraft was also carrying around Rp 6.5 billion ($470,000) to be distributed to the poor in the region, according to Kompas.com.
Indonesian search airplanes spotted debris from the wreckage from the air on Monday, but officials had to suspend the ground search and helicopter operations until the following day due to weather conditions.
The team of about 100 rescuers, including soldiers and police, who reached the crash site found some bodies were not intact while others were badly burnt.
National Search and Rescue Agency chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo told the AP that “the plane was totally destroyed and all the bodies were burned and hard to identify”.
He said all fifty four bodies would be taken to Papua’s metropolis Jayapura in order that they may well be known.
The plane was carrying 44 adult passengers, five children and five crew members when it went missing on the flight between Jayapura, the provincial capital, and Oksibil, an inland town near the border with Papua New Guinea. However, the Transportation Ministry of the country confirmed that there was no indication of any distress call from the pilot while the flight was in danger.
More details will be uncovered once the black box is found.
The plane lost contact with air traffic controllers about 10 minutes short of its destination.
“The challenge is the weather, it changes from good to bad very fast and it’s very cold now”, Captain Beni Sumaryanto, Trigana Air’s service director of operations, told AFP. It has had 14 “accidents and incidents” since 1992, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. There was no immediate word of any survivors from Sunday’s crash, which happened in bad weather.
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Correspondents say Indonesia has a patchy aviation record overall, with two major crashes in the past year. In June an Indonesian military plane crashed into a residential neighbourhood in the city of Medan, exploding in a fireball and killing 142 people.
