Bad weather hampered the efforts to retrieve bodies from the crashed Indonesian aircraft in the remote Papua region on Tuesday, the country’s Search and Rescue Agency said.
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It took rescuers two days to reach the site, about 15 kilometres from Oksibil, after initial efforts were hindered by the rough terrain and bad weather.
Brigadier General Arthur Tampi, chief of the national police’s Medical and Health Center, told Anadolu Agency that search and rescue teams had earlier planned to evacuate the bodies by helicopter but the downpour made the plan impossible.
The plane operated by Indonesian carrier Trigana Air went down Sunday during a short flight in bad weather in Papua province, killing everyone on board.
The post Officials search for Indonesian airliner that crashed into mountain carrying 54 appeared first on PBS NewsHour. Some planes that have crashed there in the past have never been found.
Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said the search had been suspended at nightfall because of limited visibility and would resume at 06:00 local time on Monday (21:00 GMT on Sunday).
The passenger still unaccounted for is an infant, Transportation Ministry spokesman Julius Adravida Barata told Reuters.
The search teams face tough challenges in the dense jungles of Papua’s sparsely populated highlands.
The plane belonging to lost contact with air traffic control when it was en route from Sentani Airport to Oksibil both located on the island of New Guinea.
In Indonesia, the Trigana accident has lead to more concern about civil aviation safety and re-opened questions about whether more can be done to improve flight safety.
Captain Beni Sumaryanto, Trigana Air’s service director of operations, said “unpredictable weather and mountainous terrain” had likely caused the accident, adding that the plane was in good condition and the pilot experienced.
Indonesia has a patchy aviation record, with other two major crashes in the past year.
With the crash site already spotted, there is no information about any survivors among 54 people onboard.
From 2007 to 2009, the European Union barred Indonesian airways from flying to Europe due to security considerations. The company had lost ten planes according to the Aviation Safety Network. All 162 people on board were killed.
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Trigana Air Service, which began operations in 1991, had 22 aircraft as of December 2013 and flies to 21 destinations in Indonesia.
