Wreckage of missing plane spotted in eastern Indonesia

“If it collided into a mountain, there has never been a case of survivors”.

Indonesian president Joko Widodo ordered the national search and rescue agency BASARNAS to coordinate the search.

“The weather was clear when the airplane took off, but 10 minutes before it was to land, it became cloudy and the airport wasn’t visible due to heavy cloud”, Raymond Konstantin, operation officer at Jayapura Search and Rescue Office, said in a phone interview. The operations are set to resume today, Monday, with the aerial and ground searches, as well as for the villagers’ reports to be finally confirmed.

Searchers conducting aerial surveillance spotted the area where the Trigana Air flight was believed to have crashed about 12 kilometres from Oksibil, where the aircraft was scheduled to land on Sunday. In 2007, the European Commission added Trigana to its list of airlines banned “because they are found to be unsafe and/or they are not sufficiently overseen by their authorities”.

Earlier reports have said the aircraft was carrying cash of about 0,000 destined for remote villages, as part of an official assistance program.

The passenger plane was also carrying almost half a million dollars in government cash for poor families to help offset a spike in fuel prices, a local postal official said Monday.

In June an Indonesian military plane crashed into a residential neighbourhood in the city of Medan, exploding in a fireball and killing 142 people.

“When a twin otter plane owned by Trigana Air searched from the air, it saw the smoke and debris”, Bambang Soelistyo told reporters.

Aviation analyst Mary Schiavo said there are several possible reasons as to why there was no distress call.

“It’s the weather there, it changes all the time”. The airline’s crisis center official in Jayapura’s Sentani airport, Budiono, said all the passengers are Indonesians and there were nine names on the initial passenger manifest that were eventually replaced by other persons – a common practice among small domestic airlines in the country.

The crashed ATR 42-300, produced by a joint venture of French Airbus and Italian Alenia Aermacchi, a subsidiary of aerospace firm Finmeccanica, made its first flight 27 years ago.

More than 250 rescuers had tried to battle through dense forest to reach what is thought to be the wreckage of the Trigana Air plane, which disappeared Sunday during a short flight in Papua province.

The crash is the third major air accident in Indonesia in eight months and is likely to raise more questions about the country’s aviation safety. Indonesia is known for its harsh weather conditions, and this marks one of over five lost airplanes in the past two years.