Indonesian airliner crash update: No survivors found, officials say
Upon reaching the site where the Trigana Air plane that boarded 54 passengers was reported to have crashed, rescue workers weren't able to find any survivors, a senior official has confirmed Tuesday.
Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency said the rescue teams were able to recover at least 38 bodies from the scene, but so far, no survivors were found.
On the other hand, he said helicopters have been deployed into the dense areas of the forest to begin evacuation in the eastern Indonesian province of Papua.
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Operations director Major-General Heronimus Guru said the remains of the passengers that were recovered have been placed into body bags, but the weather has hampered his team's efforts into getting them out of the area by air.
While the initial results of an investigation led by the national transport safety committee have not been released, officials are refusing to comment on the cause of the crash, but Guru said one of the possible factors would have been the terrain in the province.
"There's a possibility the aircraft hit a peak and then fell into a ravine because the place that it was found in is steep," he said.
The airliner lost contact with air traffic control Sunday shortly after it took off from the provincial capital when it was believed to have hit the mountainous area.
According to CNN, search planes spotted debris on a mountainside on Monday, but the fog caused the rescue teams to suspend search efforts until Tuesday.
Indonesian transportation ministry spokesman J.A. Barata previously said that the ATR 42-300 turboprop aircraft did not make a distress call before it lost contact, but villagers reported to local officials that they saw a plane crash into a mountainous area.
Trigana Air is one of the airline services banned from operating in European airspace because they are basically "found to be unsafe and/or they are not sufficiently overseen by their authorities," the European Commission says.
