Contact was lost with the Twin Otter aircraft about 30 minutes before it was due to land.
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The fact-finding joint team tasked with tracking down the missing Aviastar plane is focusing its efforts on the border area of Luwu District and Palopo City in South Sulawesi, an official has said.
“It was around 60 nautical miles from Makassar“. It was carrying three crew and seven passengers, including three children, Barata said.
Ferdinand Lumintaintang, Aviastar’s flight operations officer, said that search and rescues were using signals from the pilot’s and passengers’ mobile phones on Friday night to try to locate the aircraft in a mountainous area.
However, it went missing after its last contact at 2.36pm local time.
The plane was headed for Makassar, the provincial capital.
On Twitter, the Aviastar which flies domestic routes shared what it called the “last image” of the plane.
Deputy chief of operations of the national search and rescue agency, Heronimus Guru, said all passengers and crew were Indonesian, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Makassar Airport general manager Abdul Munir also told TVOne that the plane lost contact eight minutes after it took off. “But we have not yet received any information from the scene”.
Indonesia has a patchy aviation safety record.
“An Aviastar aircraft, bearing registration number DHC6/PKBRM, went missing”, according to Julius Andravida Barata, a spokesman of the Transportation Ministry, stated while confirming the incident. Indonesia has 59 of 63 airlines banned from flying in the European Union as well.
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Indonesia has been at the center of numerous transport crashes and disappearances in recent years.
