A United States navy ship helping hunt for an Indonesian plane missing for nine days should be able to shed light on whether metal objects found on the sea bed are wreckage, an Indonesian navy commander said on Wednesday.
The search for an Adam Air Boeing 737-400 that vanished in bad weather on January 1 with 102 people onboard has chiefly focused on large metal objects detected on Monday by Indonesian ships using sonar in deep water north of Mamuju in west Sulawesi.
”It will take them until 10pm local time tonight [Wednesday] to confirm the exact position and to figure out what kind of object is down there,” Moekhlas Sidik, commander of the navy’s eastern fleet, said after returning from aboard a ship in the area.
He said that the USNS Mary Sears, an oceanographic survey ship, had confirmed the findings of an Indonesian ship of metal objects at three points and was focusing on one of the sites.
”Mary Sears has multi-beams to receive noise frequency that will enable them to form a silhouette. We are focusing on the coordinate that has the strongest ping,” Sidik told a news conference in Makassar, Sulawesi’s largest city and where the search is being coordinated.
The spot being examined was 31km north-west of Tanjung Rengas at a depth of 1 700m, he added.
First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, the Makassar air base commander, told a news conference later findings may not even be out by Thursday morning because of a need to analyse the data.
Mark Jarrett, deputy director of operations for the US Naval Oceanographic Office, said the US vessel conducted oceanographic surveys and can map the sea bed, but had its limits.
”In shallow water that’s not too difficult to do, in less than 500m. Any deeper … and it will be very difficult for our ship to identify any parts, especially if they’re small,” he told Reuters in Washington.
‘Stupid pilots’
Six Adam Air pilots denied at a news conference that the budget carrier had pushed them to fly in unsafe conditions and that 17 pilots had left the airline in 2005 over safety concerns.
Asked if pilots had come under pressure to fly in difficult conditions, Captain Jaya Sukmana said: ”It is untrue. Pilots who can be pushed like that are stupid pilots.”
Sukmana, a veteran pilot of 27 years who has spent the last three at the no-frills carrier, also said that pilots who had left the airline in 2005 did so due to a dispute over benefits.
Other air, land and sea searches continued over, in and around Sulawesi Island for the plane that vanished on its way to Manado in the north. But Suyanto said reports on Tuesday of wreckage sightings on land were ”negative”.
Pilot Lucky Setiandika, whose wife was onboard the ill-fated Adam Air plane, has been flying round-the-clock search missions.
”It is like finding a needle in a haystack. It is as if the plane has been swallowed by the earth, but God willing, we will find it.”
The plane disappeared less than three days after a ferry with more than 600 aboard capsized and sank off Java.
Fourteen people were rescued this week after drifting hundreds of kilometres on a life raft for nine days, bringing the total number of survivors to at least 248.
Hundreds were still unaccounted for and the Senopati Nusantara ferry had yet to be found, although Tony Syaiful, spokesperson for the Indonesian navy’s eastern fleet, said two navy ships had been combing the Java Sea north of Central Java province for the past two days. — Reuters