Indonesian plane with 54 people on board missing in remote Papua region

The Trigana Air flight left the regional capital Jayapura for Oksibil in the south at 14:21 local time (05:21GMT), but lost contact with ground control.

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

Half an hour later, Trigana Air sent another turboprop plane over the same route to look for the missing aircraft, he said. “The area is mountainous”, he added.

Flight TGN267 was not equipped with an Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system, which makes tracking the aircraft hard. “We can say contact has been lost with the plane”, BASARNAS chief Bambang Soelystyo told Reuters by phone.

The passengers on the plane, reported to be an ATR-42 model, include 44 adults, two children, three toddlers and five crew members.

“A search was launched earlier today, but was called off because of bad weather, and it’s also now dark there”, he said.

A plane carrying 54 people has disappeared over the Indonesian province of Papua.

All on board are understood to be Indonesian.

Residents of a village in Papua’s Bintang district said they saw a plane flying low before crashing into a mountain Sunday. In Jun., greater than 100 people died after a military aircraft crashed right in to a residential neighborhood in Medan, Indonesia’s third-largest city.

An aircraft with 54 people on board crashed in Indonesia’s remote and mountainous region of Papua on Sunday, a government official said, the latest in a string of aviation disasters in the Southeast Asian nation.

Trigana Air is a small airline established in 1991 that operates domestic services to around 40 destinations in Indonesia.

The country Indonesia has a patchy aviation safety record in the past.