Senior Indonesian officials said on Tuesday reports that an airliner with 102 people on board had been found on Sulawesi island were wrong, and the plane was still missing.
Officials had earlier said that wreckage of the Adam Air plane had been found after it had crashed into the mountains in heavy rain. There were reports 12 people had survived the crash.
”The location has not been found. We apologise that the news that we conveyed was not true,” First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, commander of Hasanuddin air base in Makassar, told reporters.
”It’s not true that the crash location has been found,” Transport Minister Hatta Radjasa said at the same news conference, held less than an hour after another in which he had talked about difficulties in reaching what was thought to be the site.
”We found nothing when we arrived at the location,” Suyanto added.
The Adam Air plane lost contact with the ground on Monday about an hour before it was due to land in Manado in North Sulawesi, according to the transport ministry.
There were 96 passengers and six crew on board the plane. A copy of the plane’s manifest showed three passengers as non-Indonesians. The United States embassy in Jakarta said they were Americans.
The plane went missing just two days after a ferry sank in bad weather off the main island of Java, leaving about 400 people missing. At least 200 passengers were saved and rescuers were still finding survivors on Tuesday.
Confusion
Suyanto had earlier told Radio Elshinta an air force plane had spotted the wreckage of the Boeing 737-400, and an Adam Air spokesperson said 12 people had survived and would be evacuated.
In another twist, Hatta had already cast doubt on the survivors report, saying it was based on comments from villagers and could not be confirmed.
Officials said the search would now continue at other sites, concentrating in areas of western Sulawesi from where distress signals had been picked up on Monday before contact with the plane was lost.
Searchers face bad weather conditions and rough, jungled terrain in their hunt.
A spokesperson for Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had issued a statement in Jakarta, shortly before news the plane had not been found, saying the president wanted a full investigation into what went wrong.
”The president orders the transportation minister to evaluate and investigate this accident. The president also asked for an evaluation and investigation on the airworthiness of the plane and standard procedure on airplane operations,” the statement said.
Thus far transport officials have insisted the budget carrier’s Boeing 737-400 was airworthy and had no records of trouble.
The transport ministry said the plane was last evaluated by it in December 2005. It passed all service checks and was due to be checked again in late January.
It had 45 371 flying hours and, according to Adam Air, the 17-year-old aircraft’s engines are CFM56-3C1 models made by General Electric.
Air travel in Indonesia, home to 220-million people, has grown substantially since the liberalisation of the airline industry after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, which enabled privately owned budget airlines to operate.
Adam Air was established in 2002 by Agung Laksono, the speaker of Indonesia’s parliament and chairperson of the company, and Sandra Ang. It began operations on December 19 2003. – Reuters