Investigators combed through the burned-out skeleton of an Indonesian airliner on Thursday as a senior police official cited human error as a possible cause of a deadly onboard inferno.
The Garuda Airlines plane caught fire after landing at speed at Yogyakarta airport and careering off the runway into a rice paddy, killing 21 people.
More than 100 passengers and crew survived the blaze however, many of them with harrowing tales of how they scrambled for their lives before the Boeing 737 erupted.
Five of 10 Australians who were on board are feared dead, and Canberra has sent experts to the scene to help treat survivors and identify the dead.
Indonesia’s chief national police spokesperson said that early investigations pointed to human error as the cause.
”The initial investigation results indicate that the accident was caused by human error,” Inspector General Sisno Adiwinoto told reporters in Jakarta.
”However, the national police continue to investigate to know whether there are elements of criminality in that accident.”
But the head of Garuda’s Australian operations, Kerry Timms, defended the airline’s safety record and said it was too early to speculate on what caused the disaster.
”I have total confidence in flying with Garuda Indonesia,” Timms said in an interview on Australian commercial radio, adding that it had made ”significant progress” in improving its safety record in the past 10 years.
Timms said it was pointless to speculate on the cause.
”There’s no hard evidence yet,” he said. ”The reports in the media indicate the aircraft came in steeply and quickly and that’s clearly been identified by a number of reports from the passengers.
”But what has yet to be established is the reasons for that approach, and I’m sure when there’s a government and full authority investigation into that then we will have a full explanation of what happened.”
Meanwhile, at Yogyakarta police forensics experts placed numbered markers beside the scattered debris and photographed it, as some investigators worked inside the charred wreckage.
”What we are doing is an investigation of the accident scene. We number and measure debris,” Pitoyo Agung, the head of a local police unit, said.
”We have numbered about 25 pieces but we cannot make a conclusion yet.”
Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa said the probe would be spearheaded by the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT).
The aircraft’s ”black box” containing flight data has been recovered, but will take time to analyse, the Detikcom news website quoted KNKT investigator J Tumenggung as saying.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said an Australian air force officer who survived the accident told him the plane had been going too fast when it landed.
Fire has eaten away the entire right side of the cabin, but the left side remains, blackened but still standing from the windows down. The engines are sheared off and scattered.
The tail is intact, but investigators painted over the airline’s logo of a garuda, a mythical bird, before trying to cut off the fin with a blowtorch.
Rajasa said the tail contained the plane’s radar, which was interfering with other aircraft communications.
Australia rushed two medical teams and police victim identification experts to Yogyakarta, including Fiona Wood, a renowned Perth-based burns specialist who helped treat survivors of the Bali bombings.
Australian and Indonesian police previously worked together after bombings killed more than 90 Australians on Bali in 2002 and 2005.
The disaster has again called into question the blighted transport safety record in Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 220-million people.
A Boeing 737-400 owned by low-fare carrier Adam Air with 102 people aboard crashed into the sea off the island of Sulawesi on New Year’s Day, leaving no survivors. — AFP
