Aircraft with 54 people on board crashes in remote area of Indonesia

Villagers have reported a plane crash just hours after the disappearance of an aircraft with 54 people on board in the Indonesian province of Papua. Trigana flight IL267 failed to arrive in Oksibil from Sentani as scheduled after contact was lost 33 minutes after take-off. The internal flight, which had 44 adults, five children and five crew on board, would normally take 45 minutes. Trigana Air Service official Beni Sumaryanto said the airline had received reports of a crash from a village in the forested and mountainous district of Oksibil. The search has now been suspended owing to nightfall.

The weather is currently very bad there, it’s very dark and cloudy. It’s not conducive for a search. The area is mountainous.

Transport ministry spokesman J A Barata

The ATR-42 plane was built in France and Italy. The Aviation Safety Network claims the plane is 27 years old and Trigana has had 14 serious incidents since it began operating in 1991, writing off 10 aircraft. In 2009, a Merpati flight also went missing on Jayapura-Oksibil route. It had crashed into a mountain and was discovered after two days. The latest incident comes eight months after an AirAsia plane crashed on its way from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore, killing all 162 people on board. The Trigana Air Service is one of many Indonesian airlines banned from operating in the European Union for safety reasons.

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