Kanupriya Kapoor and Fergus Jensen
Reuters
JAKARTA: An aircraft with 54 people on board crashed in Indonesia’s remote and mountainous region of Papua yesterday, a government official said, the latest in a string of aviation disasters in the Southeast Asian nation.
“The latest information is that the Trigana aircraft that lost contact has been found at Camp 3, Ok Bape district in the Bintang Mountains regency,” air transportation director general Suprasetyo said. “Residents provided information that the aircraft crashed into Tangok mountain.”
There was no immediate word on whether anyone survived.
Earlier, the national search and rescue agency (Basarnas) said a twin-turboprop plane had lost contact with air traffic control as it flew over the forested area of eastern Indonesia, but efforts to trace it were difficult because of failing light.
Trigana Air operations director Beni Sumaryanto said 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.
According to the official Basarnas Twitter account, the aircraft, a short-haul ATR 42-300 airliner belonging to Trigana Air Service and built in France and Italy, was carrying 44 adult passengers, five crew and five children and infants.
The plane was flying between Jayapura’s Sentani Airport and Oksibil, due south of Jayapura, the capital of Papua province.
According to the aviation safety network, the ATR 42-300 made its first flight 27 years ago. The airline has been on the EU’s list of banned carriers since 2007. Airlines on the list are barred from operating in European airspace due to either concerns about safety standards or the regulatory environment in their country of registration.
Trigana has had 14 serious incidents since it began operations in 1991. Excluding this latest incident, it has written off 10 aircraft.
Indonesia has a patchy aviation safety record and has seen two major plane crashes in the past year, including an AirAsia flight that went down in the Java Sea on December 28 killing all 162 people on board.
Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo promised a review of the ageing air force fleet in July after a military transport plane crashed, killing more than 100 people.