Trigana Air Operations Director Beni Sumaryanto said that within 30 minutes of hearing that the aircraft was missing, the airline sent another plane to scour the same flight path but it had found nothing because of bad weather, local media reported.
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Rescuers battled Monday to reach a remote, mountainous site in eastern Indonesia where debris has been spotted after a plane carrying 54 people and cash worth about Dh1.
Authorities had said earlier that villagers in a remote area of Indonesia’s eastern Papua province reported seeing the passenger plane crash into a mountain.
The Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 plane’s disappearance is the latest in a string of aviation disasters in Southeast Asia. It took off from Sentani Airport in Jayapura, capital of Papua province and was bound for the southern town of Oksibil.
All 16 passengers and crew were killed, and an Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee report cited the lack of ground-based navigation aids, poor weather information and “marginal visual meteorological conditions” as contributory causes.
Papua relies heavily on air transport because of limited road networks through its jungle.
A photo of the suspected site showed an area that appeared to be fire-blackened and scattered with debris in thick forest, and Soelistyo said he was “98 percent” certain it was the location of the crash.
The Trigana Air Service plane is the third Indonesian aircraft to crash in the past eight months. But accidents in recent years have raised urgent questions about the safety of Indonesia’s booming airline sector, with experts saying poor maintenance, rule-bending, and a shortage of trained professionals are partly to blame.
An officer of the nation’s Search and Rescue Agency, Raymond Konstantin, disclosed that six other aircrafts are being dispatched to help with the search.
In December, AirAsia Flight QZ8501 went down in the Java Sea while headed from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore.
“Smoke was still billowing from the wreckage when it was spotted by a plane search”, said Henry Bambang Soelistyo, the chief of the National Search and Rescue Agency.
Some planes that have crashed there in the past have never been found.
From 2007 to 2009, the European Union barred Indonesian airlines from flying to Europe because of safety concerns.
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The second incident happened in June when an Indonesian military plane crashed into a residential neighbourhood in the city of Medan, exploding in a fireball and killing 142 people.
