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There was no word yet on whether anyone might have survived the crash.

Residents found two metal pieces that might have come from the aircraft that went missing with 54 people on board in Indonesia’s remote Papua province, a military official said Monday.

The first bodies of 54 people killed when a plane went down in eastern Indonesia were Wednesday carried from the remote crash site after bad weather hampered efforts to airlift them.

Air transport is commonly used despite Indonesia’s patchy aviation record… since land travel is often impossible in the island country.

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.

An official says an Indonesian airliner carrying 54 people has lost contact over the country’s easternmost province of Papua.

There was no indication of a distress call from the French-built ATR 42-300twin turboprop plane, the ministry said. No information has been given about whether there were any survivors from the crash.

A search and rescue plane seeking a crashed aircraft with 54 people on board in Indonesia’s Papua province spotted debris believed to be from the missing flight on Monday, the local police chief said.

There are still few details about what actually happened to the Trigana Air Service flight, but what is known is that the plane took off on Sunday from Papua’s provincial capital, Jayapura.

A Malaysian team have brought back two tiny objects from the Maldives to verify if they are debris from the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 aircraft, Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said Sunday.

His suggestion that it’s possible for a plane of that size to float for a while before sinking was proved by US Airways Flight 1549 that landed on the Hudson River in 2009, and remained above water for long enough for all 155 passengers and crew aboard to be evacuated.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said that the differences between his country’s firm declaration and France’s less categorical one were “down to a choice of words”.

Investigators in France weren’t so sure quite yet.

But Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the agency leading the search, said that the ATSB was working on the assumption that the wing part was linked to MH370. Family members in China say they want to be taken to the island of Reunion.

Malaysia, which asked for assistance from France in its search for more debris on Reunion Island, also appealed to the governments of Mauritius, about 140 miles northeast of Reunion, and Madagascar, to help widen the search.