Indonesia continues searching for missing plane in Papua

An Indonesian search team arrived at the site of a crashed plane in a forested, remote mountainous area in Papua province on Tuesday, two days after the Trigana Air flight went down with 54 people on board.

The Chief of Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency Bambang Soelistyo told reporters in a morning briefing that the search team had reached the site on foot after a whole day of trekking through the difficult terrain.

“Another two members of the Air Force arrived at the crash site on foot, so now we have four people securing the are,” he said.

In a separate phone interview, he told Reuters 38 bodies had been pulled out in the wreckage.

Two hundred and sixty-six people were involved in the search operation, while 11 aircraft scoured the thickly forested area. So far, rescuers have yet to detect the aircraft’s black boxes that would help to determine the cause of crash.

There were 44 adult passengers, five children and infants and five crew on the short-haul flight from Sentani Airport in Jayapura, capital of the province of Papua, south to Oksibil.

All aboard were Indonesian nationals, officials have said.

Indonesia has a patchy aviation safety record, with two major plane crashes in the past year.

One involved an AirAsia flight that went down in the Java Sea, killing all 162 aboard. In June, more than 100 people died in the crash of a military transport plane, prompting Indonesia’s president to promise a review of the ageing air force fleet.