makassar

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 the plane has chiefly focused on large metal objects detected on Monday by Indonesian ships using sonar in deep water.

Indonesia beefed up its search for a missing passenger plane on Sunday, despatching more spotter aircraft to try to locate the jet nearly a week after its mysterious disappearance. Relatives of missing passengers, who were allowed to overfly part of the search area, admitted it put the scale of the task into perspective.

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.

Rescuers found the smoldering wreckage of an Indonesian jetliner that crashed into mountains during a storm, and officials said 90 people were killed and that 12 survived the country’s second major transportation disaster in days. The Boeing 737-400 sent out two distress signals half way through its two-hour flight on Monday from the main island of Java to Sulawesi.