| Thursday, January 04, 2007 |
| Twelve survive Indonesian plane crash |
Rescue teams on Tuesday morning were struggling to evacuate the 12 survivors of a plane crash from the remote, rugged mountains on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Authorities said the other 90 people on board the Adam Air flight, which crashed in bad weather on Monday afternoon in Palewali district in West Sulawesi province, had died. Smouldering wreckage and corpses were strewn across a wide area, Ali Bahal, the district chief, told local radio.
“The latest reports from the crash site that we’ve received are that 12 people survived,” Captain Hartono, an Adam Air official, said. “They’re in a bad condition and we’re trying to evacuate them as soon as possible. But the weather is too bad for helicopters to land so we’re probably going to have to take them out by land.”
Rescuers reached the crash site, some 250 kilometres north of Makassar, the main city in southern Sulawesi, at 6 am on Tuesday. Access to the site was restricted to two-wheel vehicles and was out of mobile phone range. Captain Hartono said it would take a few hours to get the survivors to hospital.
Three people with foreign-sounding names were on the passenger manifest. Local media reported they were Americans, but this was yet to be confirmed.
Hartono said the plane’s black box had yet to be found and that it was too early to determine the precise cause of the crash.
The crash occurred three days after a ferry sank in the Java Sea with more than 600 people on board. At least 400 people are feared to have died in that incident.
Controllers lost contact with the flight that was en route from Surabaya on Java to Manado, in north Sulawesi, at 3.07 pm local time on Monday when it was at 35,000 feet, some 85 nautical miles north-west of Makassar. A Singaporean satellite detected a distress call a few minutes later.
The 17-year-old Boeing 737-400 plane last underwent a major service in December 2005, but had what the airline described as a “thorough check” three days ago and no problems were found.
Adam Air, a budget carrier that has been flying for three years, has a patchy safety record. Last year, at least one of its planes skidded off a runway and another went off course for four hours before being able to make an emergency landing.
The airline on Tuesday morning flew relatives of the passengers and crew to Makassar to await developments. |
| posted by a correspondent @ 12:05 AM |
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