Pieces of an Indonesian airliner that vanished with 102 people on board have been found in the ocean, officials said on Thursday, after a painstaking 10-day search from jungles to stormy seas.
Parts, including a tail stabiliser and flight attendant seats, were confirmed or reported found in the sea and on beaches near the town of Pare Pare on the west coast of Sulawesi Island. A top search official later said that a woman’s body recovered in the vicinity was not that of a missing passenger.
Exhausted relatives expressed relief that they finally had firm news on the plane, even if the news was not good, after a long wait and an erroneous report that the airliner had crashed in the jungle and some people had survived.
”I still hope that they are found alive but I have to accept all kind of conditions,” Lusy Kembuan told Metro TV. She had 17 relatives on the plane, including her husband and children.
The Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was heading from Surabaya in Central Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather on New Year’s Day. The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over the weather.
”This morning I announced that there has been a finding of a part of Adam Air. What was found was the right tail’s stabiliser number 65C25746-76. This thing was found by a fisherman in Pare Pare,” said Eddy Suyanto, who has been coordinating search efforts from an air base in the South Sulawesi capital, Makassar.
”This object has the same number as the Boeing catalogue,” he told reporters, displaying the slightly scratched white stabiliser of about 1m in length found on Wednesday.
Two flight attendant seats were also found on a beach on Thursday in the same general area, search-and-rescue official Immal Yuhani told Reuters.
A stream of other apparent wreckage had also been found and was being examined, said Genot Hardianto, the chief of police at Pare Pare, about 100km north of Makassar.
”So far there have been eight fragments made of fibre and aluminium in sizes ranging from 25cm to 50cm long, a life vest, an ID card, a flare and a headrest,” he said.
Metro Television showed footage of a series of local people holding what appeared to be plane fragments. One elderly woman showed a small square piece of mangled, white wreckage.
Elshinta radio said fishermen had discovered a life-vest wrapper 10km from the stabiliser’s location.
Earlier, a police official told Reuters the body of a woman, estimated to be in her 30s, had been recovered, but Suyanto had ruled out her as one of the passengers. He did not elaborate.
Relief
In a Makassar hotel where relatives of the Adam Air passengers have been staying, Rosmala Dewi, mother of a flight attendant on the plane, told reporters:
”I feel a bit relieved if it is true that the search team has found that piece. We have waited so long, and we have received so many confusing reports. We do not know whether to go home or stay here forever.”
Fanny Duran (46), whose sister, brother-in-law and their child were on the plane, also felt some relief after the wait.
”As human beings we have lost hope after 10 days but if God wants a miracle to happen it will happen, including the existence of survivors,” he told Reuters.
Two truckloads of soldiers were deployed to Pare Pare to help comb the beaches, with rubber boats also being used in the area.
Pare Pare is about 150km south of Mamuju in west Sulawesi, which has been the main focus of the search since Monday when Indonesian ships detected large metal objects on the sea bed.
At the site further north where the objects were detected, a United States Navy oceanographic ship, the Mary Sears, was helping in the search but had yet to determine whether the objects were wreckage.
The plane vanished less than three days after a ferry with more than 600 aboard capsized and sank off Java. Survivors of that accident were still being found nine days later hundreds of kilometres away, indicating the power of ocean currents in parts of Indonesia.
Tony Syaiful, spokesperson for the Indonesian navy’s eastern fleet, told Reuters two navy ships were searching for the missing ferry in the Tanjung Awarawar area of the Java sea and were using divers to try and find the wreck of the doomed ferry.
Both disasters have raised questions over transport safety standards in Indonesia, particularly with a string of budget airlines springing up in Indonesia over the past few years. — Reuters