October 03, 2015•Update: October 03, 2015
By Ainur Rohmah
JAKARTA
Indonesian authorities have suspended the air search for a plane that went missing with 10 people on board for the night after efforts were hampered by mountainous terrain and bad weather.
Bambang Soelistyo, Search and Rescue Agency chief, told reporters Saturday night that the air search for the Aviastar airline plane in a mountainous area of eastern Sulawesi island had been unsuccessful, and would resume Sunday.
"The search has been failed today because we couldn't find the plane's location," Kompas.com quoted him as saying.
Around 150 personnel will continue the search operation by land overnight.
Brig. Gen. Ivan Ahmad Riski, the Agency’s operations director, had told Anadolu Agency earlier that personnel were deployed to Palopo city in South Sulawesi province.
"They search through two routes, land and air," he said.
He added that two Twin Otter planes belonging to Aviastar airlines, the owner of the plane that lost contact during a 70-minute flight Friday, and an air force helicopter were helping in the search operation.
According to Riski, the teams have a clearer idea of the plane’s location after the mobile phone signal of a crewmember on the flight was detected Friday night.
According to the flight’s manifest, the plane had been carrying seven passengers -- including a child and two babies – and three crewmembers from Masamba town en route to the provincial capital of Makassar.
Soelistyo said Saturday that the difficulty in finding the plane may be due to it not being equipped with an emergency locater transmitter (ELT).
"Aviastar airplane doesn't [appear to be] complete with ELT, so Air Traffic Control and the army's radar can not catch its emergency signal," he said at the press conference.
The head of the national transportation safety committee, however, had earlier said the plane was equipped with an emergency locater transmitter, but the device could have been damaged if the plane had crashed.
"If the impact is hard, the tool will be damaged and could not function,” Kompas.com quoted Tjahjono Soerjanto as saying. “Because the tool was not designed to withstand heavy impact."
Meanwhile, Aviastar Mandiri’s commercial general manager assured that both the pilot and co-pilot had completed sufficient flight hours.
"Hopefully, [the loss of the aircraft] not because of human error," Petrus Budi said.
He added that the visibility at the time the plane lost contact had been good at 9 kilometers, with thin cloud cover and winds conducive for a flight.
Budi also insisted that the 34-year-old plane had undergone the required maintenance, Kompas.com reported.
"So, the plane can be said to be in airworthy condition," he underlined.
