Remains of missing plane found carrying 54 passengers

A Trigana Air pilot spotted the wreckage in the “area that we suspected last night”, Ludi Yanto, head of the Jayapura Search and Rescue Office, said by telephone Monday.

The Jakarta post has published the names of the 49 passengers on board the aircraft.

Indonesia’s postal office has told the BBC that the plane was carrying four bags containing cash, about 6.5 billion rupiah ($486,000; £300,000), for villagers living in remote places in Papua.

Soelistyo said elite forces from the Army and Air Force will build a helipad for evacuation purposes where the plane got crashed.

Officials deployed two ground teams to the site, which is at an altitude of 2,600 meters (8,500 feet), but suspended efforts to get there because of thick fog.

Details are still filtering through, but the official says villagers reported seeing the plane smash into the side of a mountain.

The remains of a flight that went missing with 54 people on board have been found.

Heavy cloud initially delayed plans for an aerial survey to locate the Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 plane, which the government confirmed on Sunday had crashed, the latest in a string of aviation disasters in Southeast Asia.

He described the mountain, Mount Tangok, as “not very tall”, adding that when the plane crashed, it was probably 10 minutes away from the Oksibil airport. The transport ministry later said local residents had found the wreckage.

It was not clear whether there were any survivors of the crash, which occurred during hard weather conditions in the mountainous region.

According to the Twitter post of the rescue agency, it was on Sunday afternoon when the airline lost its contact with air traffic control.

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

The area is mountainous and densely forested, which will make recovery operations hard. But accidents in recent years have raised urgent questions about the safety of Indonesia’s booming airline sector, with experts saying poor maintenance, rule-bending, and a shortage of trained professionals are partly to blame.

Trigana Air started operations in 1991 and it provides domestic flights to 40 destinations within Indonesia.

Airlines on the list are barred from operating in European airspace due to either concerns about safety standards or the regulatory environment in their country of registration.

In December 2014 162 people died when an AirAsia aircraft crashed into the Java Sea in stormy weather.