Plane with 54 people on board loses contact in Papua, Indonesia

Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency (SAR) reported they were informed contact with the plan was lost at 2:55p.m.

The aircraft was carrying 44 adult passengers, five children and five crew members, the agency also tweeted.

Last December, all 162 people aboard an AirAsia jet were killed when the plane plummeted into the Java Sea as it ran into stormy weather on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, to Singapore.

The aircraft is thought to have crashed into a mountain.

The plane was en route to the southern town of Oksibil.

Contact with the plane is believed to have been lost just over half an hour after take-off.

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Trigana flight IL267 failed to arrive in Oksibil from Sentani as scheduled after contact was lost in poor weather 33 minutes after take-off.

Update: Investigators tell Mirror Online ‘We believe plane crashed but we’re praying for survivors’.

Military officers, policemen and other search and rescue personnel in Papua province participated in the coordinated search efforts, Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said.

ATR is a joint venture between Airbus and Alenia Aermacchi, a subsidiary of Italian aerospace firm Finmeccanica.

“Oksibil is a mountainous area where weather is very unpredictable”, Beni Sumaryanto, Trigana Air’s director of operations, told AFP.

“Papua is among the most remote provinces in Indonesia – which has a checkered air safety record in recent years”.

Trigana has been blacklisted by the European Union since 2007.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, the airline has written off 10 aircraft, excluding this latest incident, since starting operations in 1991. Officials suspect that crash was caused by bad weather.

This report was first published on CNN.com, “Villagers saw Indonesian plane crash into mountain, officials say.”