Indonesia beefs up plane search with 2 helicopters
Source: Reuters
By Ahmad Pathoni MAKASSAR, Indonesia, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Two Indonesian Air Force helicopters joined the search on Monday to locate a missing airliner a week after it vanished in bad weather with 102 aboard, a military spokesman said. They will be part of Monday's mission which will focus on the Bone Strait between the two southern arms of Sulawesi island and the onshore areas of western Sulawesi, Captain Mulyadi said in Makassar, the island's largest city from where search efforts are being coordinated. A U.S. ship with sonar capability and the ability to detect underwater metal, USNS Mary Sears, will arrive on Tuesday to join the search, which already includes planes, helicopters, navy ships, and thousands of troops and police on the ground. "We hope the involvement of the oceanographic survey ship Mary Sears will boost the search effort," Mulyadi said. The search for the 17-year-old Boeing 737-400 operated by Indonesian budget airline Adam Air has been hampered by rain, clouds and wind, with the area's jungle-covered mountainous terrain also making it difficult to spot things from the air. The region also lacks roads to reach areas on the ground and communications infrastructure is often poor. Over the weekend relatives of passengers waiting in Makassar for news confronted Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla and called for more to be done. Kalla told them the government would spare no effort in its search for the missing plane, but the relatives urged Indonesia to accept more help from abroad. In addition to the U.S. ship, an American military plane and a Singapore Air Force Fokker-50 are already helping the search. "I won't go home until they find the plane," Hendra Tuna, whose niece and her husband were among the passengers, said on Sunday. "This uncertainty makes us confused." The pilot made no distress call from the plane, which took off from Surabaya on Java island on Jan. 1 for Manado, provincial capital of North Sulawesi. In his last conversation with Makassar air traffic control, he said he had encountered cross-winds, officials said. The plane disappeared less than three days after a ferry capsized and sank off Java. Hariadi Purnomo, a search and rescue official in Surabaya in East Java, told Reuters on Monday that 244 people from the ferry had been rescued and the tally of confirmed dead had reached 11. That leaves nearly 400 still unaccounted for. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has called for investigations into what went wrong in both cases as well as a general probe into the state of Indonesia's transport system. The network serves 220 million people on an archipelago of 17,000 islands which stretches as wide as the United States.
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