An aircraft with 54 people on board crashed in Indonesia’s remote and mountainous region of Papua on Sunday. The Trigana Air Service plane was flying from Papua’s provincial capital, Jayapura, to the Papua city of Oksibil when it lost contact with Oksibil’s airport, said Transportation Ministry spokesman Julius Barata. There was no indication that the pilot had made a distress call, he said.
Trigana Air Operations Director Beni Sumaryanto said that within 30 minutes of hearing that the aircraft was missing, the airline sent another plane to scour the same flight path but it had found nothing because of bad weather, local media reported.
Oksibil, which is about 280 kilometers (175 miles) south of Jayapura, was experiencing heavy rain, strong winds and fog when the plane lost contact with the airport minutes before it was scheduled to land.
Trigana flight TGN267 with its pilot Captain Hasanuddin was scheduled to arrive at Oksibil at 15.15 CET.
According to the National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS), the aircraft was a short-haul ATR 42-300.
