Indonesia widens search for missing plane
Source: Reuters
By Ahmad Pathoni MAKASSAR, Indonesia, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Indonesia has widened the hunt around Sulawesi island for a plane that disappeared without a trace five days ago with 102 people aboard, an air force commander said on Friday. The search had concentrated in western Sulawesi areas from where emergency signals were received on Monday, when the plane suddenly went missing in bad weather but with no mayday call from the pilot. "Today we widen our scope because we did not find anything in the area covered by emergency signals," First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, commander of the base in Makassar, Sulawesi's largest city, told Reuters early on Friday. He said new areas would include sites further to the north and east, while adding that another area south of Manado, only explored late on Thursday, had failed to yield any clues. Manado was the budget carrier Adam Air jet's final destination on a flight that began in Jakarta and had an interim stop in Surabaya on Java island, where most of the passengers for Manado in North Sulawesi boarded. The expanded search has been based on factors ranging from late-arriving reports of other emergency signals to calculations of possible alternate courses the pilot of the 17-year-old Boeing 737-400 might have chosen to take to avoid bad weather. Despite the lack of success so far, searchers "are fully-charged, in terms our battery is (still full)," said air force Lieutenant Colonel Firdaus Syamsudin, a senior search coordinator. "Cross your fingers so that the weather stays bright," he told Reuters. Friday's morning weather was fair and clear. Rain, winds and cloudy weather have all hampered search efforts, which face other problems such as rugged, mountainous terrain, much of it covered with jungle and forest. DISTRESS SIGNALS Officials said at least four Indonesian fixed-wing military planes and one Singapore air force Fokker-50, as well as a helicopter, army and police ground teams, and civilian and navy ships were involved in Friday's searches. In addition to land searches, planes and ships are combing the Makassar Strait between the islands of Sulawesi and Borneo. Government officials have apologised for erroneously saying on Tuesday that the wreckage had been found and 12 people survived. The missing plane was carrying 96 passengers -- including three Americans -- and six crew. The western Sulawesi search coverage is based on distress signals picked up by a Singapore satellite on Monday from the doomed plane. Critics have asked why Indonesia did not pick up the signals itself. Ikhsan Tatang, director general of aviation at Indonesia's transport ministry, told Reuters on Thursday that the world's fourth most populous country lacked equipment to receive them. "Not all countries need to have a special satellite to catch such signals. We don't need it because we have international cooperation," he said, adding Indonesia lacked money for that. Even so, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered a full investigation into the condition of all commercial planes in Indonesia and what went wrong in the Adam Air case, as well as an evaluation of the nation's transportation system. Although the country has seen a proliferation of airlines to serve it 17,000 islands and 220 million people since the industry was deregulated, some analysts and politicians say they spend too little on safety. Ferries are frequently overloaded, and the vast country ranks low on paved roads, with those that exist often twisting two-lane routes that are poorly maintained. Adam Air's plane disappeared less than three days after a ferry capsized and sank off Indonesia's main island of Java. Officials say at least 239 of those on the ferry have been rescued since it sank, but nearly 400 more are unaccounted for. On Friday Jakarta still gave the official death toll as under 10. The confusion over the plane and the lags in data from the sinking highlight the logistical difficulties of dealing with disasters, from quakes and volcanoes to floods and forest fires, in a vast archipelago stretching as wide as the United States. (With additional reporting by Mita Valina Liem in Jakarta)
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