Indonesian passenger plane carrying 54 people feared to have crashed in Papua

Missing: stock photograph shows a Trigana Air Service aircraft
EPA
Rachel Blundy16 August 2015

An Indonesian passenger plane carrying 54 people is feared to have crashed in Papua during a short flight in bad weather, officials have said.

The aircraft, which was travelling from Jayapura's Sentani Airport to Oksibil, lost contact with air traffic control today in the remote eastern Papua region.

Local villagers told authorities that they had discovered debris from the plane after it crashed into a mountain. The number of casualties was not immediately known.

The Trigana Air Service aircraft was carrying 44 adult passengers, five crew and five children and infants, according to the official BASARNAS Twitter account.

An air search for the missing plane was suspended and is set to resume on Monday. Much of Papua is covered with impenetrable jungles and mountains.

Some planes that have crashed there in the past have never been found.

Bambang Soelystyo, chief of the National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS), told Reuters, that controllers had "lost contact" with the plane.

Transportation Ministry spokesman Julius Barata told the Associated Press that the plane lost contact with Oksibil's airport nine minutes before it was due to complete its 42 minute journey.

Trigana has been on the EU blacklist of banned carriers since 2007. Airlines on the list are barred from operating in European airspace due to either concerns about its safety standards, or concerns about the regulatory environment in its country of registration.

Trigana has had 14 serious incidents since it began operations in 1991, according to the Aviation Safety Network's online database. Excluding this latest incident, it has written off 10 aircraft.

Indonesia has a patchy aviation safety record and has seen two major plane crashes in the past year, including an AirAsia flight that went down in the Java Sea, killing everyone on board.

That crash prompted the government to introduce regulations aimed at improving safety.

That disaster was one of five suffered by Asian carriers in a 12-month span, including Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which went missing in March 2014 with 239 people aboard during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

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