After trekking through mountain forests laced with fog,
Indonesian rescue workers on Tuesday reached the crash site of a passenger
plane that went missing over the weekend.
They found a
grisly scene of bodies and debris strewn among the trees.
None of the 54
people on board the Trigana Air Service flight survived the disaster, said
Heronimus Guru, the deputy director of operations for Indonesia's national
search and rescue agency.
Helicopters are
being deployed to the remote area in the eastern Indonesian province of Papua
to begin the evacuation process, authorities said.
The airliner lost contact with air traffic control Sunday about
half an hour into a short flight from Papua's provincial capital to a town in
the mountains.
Search planes
spotted debris on a mountainside Monday, but efforts to reach it on foot and by
helicopter were suspended until Tuesday because of bad weather.
Report of crash from villagers
There was no indication that a distress
call was made from Trigana's ATR 42-300 turboprop aircraft before it lost
contact Sunday, Indonesian Transportation Ministry spokesman J.A. Barata told
CNN Indonesia.
There are many
possible reasons for the apparent lack of a distress call, CNN aviation analyst
Mary Schiavo said. It could indicate that crew members were too busy dealing
with whatever situation arose to send one, or that they didn't realize they
were in trouble, she said.
Search crews
Tuesday found the plane's flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,
known as "black boxes," and they might provide some answers. Both
recorders are in good condition, Guru said.
Villagers
reported seeing a plane crash into a mountain, according to Indonesian aviation
authorities. The site is about 14 kilometers (9 miles) from the airport where
the plane was supposed to land, search officials said.
The plane was
carrying 44 adult passengers, five children and five crew members when it went
missing on the flight between Jayapura, the provincial capital, and Oksibil, an
inland town near the border with Papua New Guinea.
All those on
board were Indonesian, authorities said.
Few roads, unpredictable weather
The search teams face tough challenges
in the dense jungles of Papua's sparsely populated highlands.
Weather patterns
are unpredictable in the region, with a tropical climate, tall mountains and
moisture coming in from the sea.
Papua has few
roads connecting cities, towns and tribal villages. To get where they want to
go, people either have to take a plane or a boat -- or walk, which can
sometimes take months.
"This is a
place where some people still hunt their food with bows and arrows while others
buy it in supermarkets," the travel guide Lonely Planet says in its
description of the province.
A big part of
Trigana Air's business is ferrying people and cargo between different parts of
Papua.
Before Sunday's
crash, the airline had been involved in 19 serious safety incidents since 1992,according to Flightglobal, a website that
tracks the global aviation industry.
Eight of the
incidents resulted in the loss of the aircraft, and the 11 others involved
major damage, Flightglobal said.
Airline on EU blacklist
Trigana is one of a large number of
airlines banned from operating in European airspace"because
they are found to be unsafe and/or they are not sufficiently overseen by their
authorities," according to the European Commission.
It has been on
the list since 2007.
The loss Sunday
of the Trigana plane is Indonesia's third air disaster in less than eight
months.
In December, AirAsia Flight QZ8501 went down in the Java Sea while headed
from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. All 162 people on board were killed.
And in June, an Indonesian military transport plane crashed soon after taking off from the
city of Medan, killing at least 135 people.
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