A short time later Suprasetyo confirmed that villagers had found the crash site.
According to the aircraft’s flight manifest, Capt.Hasanudin’s crew comprised co-pilot Aryadin, mechanic officer Mario and female flight attendants, Ika and Dita.
A small Indonesian aircraft with 54 people onboard lost contact with air traffic control on Sunday in the remote Papua region in the country’s east, the transport ministry said.
Officials said that the ATR 42-300 turboprop plane, which was operated by the Indonesian carrier Trigana Air, went missing on Sunday.
The aircraft was reportedly flying between Jayapra’s Sentani Airport and Oksibil, south of Jayapura, the capital of the Papua province.
But the plane never arrived.
It had left Jayapura about half an hour before it disappeared.
The agency’s Jayapura office was coordinating the search, a separate Tweet read as dusk set in across the tropics.
Reports indicated that “the weather was very bad” in Papua at the time the plane was in the air.
Officials suspect that crash was caused by bad weather. “It is not overcapacity, as the plane could take 50 passengers”, Beni Sumaryanto, a Trigana Air official, told AFP.
Reuters adds a few dark footnotes, including that Trigana has been banned from flying in European airspace since 2007 over safety concerns.
Last December an AirAsia plane crashed in the Java Sea, killing all 192 people on board – and in July a military transport plane crashed in a residential area of Medan, Sumatra claiming 140 lives.
Trigana has had 14 serious incidents and written off 10 aircraft since it began operations in 1991, according to the Aviation Safety Network’s online database.
A plane was sent to look for the missing airliner, but the search was later suspended due to darkness, says Susanto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
“The weather characteristic of the region is tropical, which means constant low clouds, high rain clouds, which are unsafe and unforgiving if entered by accident by an aircraft or a helicopter”, Dubai-based Mark D. Martin, founder and chief executive officer of the consulting firm said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.
