INDONESIA: Indonesia widens search for missing plane

Indonesia widened the hunt around Sulawesi island on Friday (January 5) for a plane that disappeared without a trace five days ago with 102 people aboard, an air force commander said. The search had concentrated in areas of western Sulawesi from where emergency signals were received on Monday (January 1), when the plane went missing in bad weather but with no mayday call from the pilot. In what officials said was his last conversation with air traffic control in Makassar, the pilot said the flight had encountered crosswinds and needed safe coordinates. Radar continued to track the flight for some time after that. The North Sulawesi provincial capital, Manado, was the budget carrier Adam Air jet's destination. The expanded search has been based on factors ranging from late-arriving reports of other emergency signals to calculations of possible alternate courses the pilot of the 17-year-old Boeing 737-400 might have chosen to avoid bad weather. Rain, winds and cloudy weather have all hampered search efforts, which face other problems such as rugged, mountainous terrain, much of it covered with jungle and forest. The weather Friday morning in Makassar was fair and clear but a Reuters cameraman aboard a navy plane said a rainstorm in western Sulawesi made the Nomad zig-zag among dangerous clusters of cloud. Officials said at least four Indonesian fixed-wing military planes a Singapore air force Fokker-50 and a helicopter, were looking for the plane along with army and police ground teams and civilian and navy ships. Government officials have apologised for erroneously saying on Tuesday the wreckage of the missing plane, carrying 96 passengers -- including three Americans -- and six crew, had been found and 12 people survived. Six people from the U.S. National Transport Safety Board and Boeing were expected to arrive at Makassar on Saturday (January 6) to help the investigation, said Setyo Rahardjo, chief of Indonesia's national transportation safety commission. A Singapore satellite picked up distress signals from the plane and relayed it to Jakarta on Monday because the world's fourth most populous country lacked the equipment, said Ikhsan Tatang, a senior official at Indonesia's transport ministry. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered a full investigation into the condition of all commercial planes in Indonesia and what went wrong in the Adam Air case, as well as an evaluation of the nation's transportation system. Although the country has seen a proliferation of airlines to serve its 17,000 islands and 220 million people since the industry was deregulated, some analysts and politicians say they spend too little on safety. Ferries are frequently overloaded, and the vast country ranks low on paved roads, with those that exist often twisting two-lane routes that are poorly maintained. Adam Air's plane disappeared less than three days after a ferry capsized and sank off Indonesia's main island of Java. Officials say at least 239 of those on the ferry have been rescued since it sank, but nearly 400 more are unaccounted for. The confusion over the plane and the lags in data from the sinking highlight the logistical difficulties of dealing with disasters, from quakes and volcanoes to floods and forest fires, in a vast archipelago stretching as wide as the United States.

ITN Source | January 5, 2007

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