U.S. team to help probe missing Indonesian plane
Source: Reuters
(Adds vice president's comments, details on angry relatives) By Ahmad Pathoni MAKASSAR, Indonesia, Jan 6 (Reuters) - U.S. transport safety officials arrived in Indonesia's Sulawesi on Saturday to help investigate the disappearance of an airliner with 102 people aboard. The 17-year-old Boeing 737-400, operated by Indonesian budget carrier Adam Air, went missing on Monday in bad weather. The pilot did not issue a mayday call and there have been no emergency locator signals to help rescuers combing jungles, mountains and seas around Sulawesi to find the plane. In what officials said was his last conversation with air traffic control in Makassar, the pilot said the flight had encountered crosswinds and needed safe coordinates. Radar continued to track the flight for some time after that. Its last communication was a signal from its emergency locator beacon that a Singapore satellite picked up and relayed to Jakarta. Nothing has been heard since. The chief of the air base in Makassar, Eddy Suyanto, said the plane had changed its path twice after encountering bad weather. The U.S. team will work with Indonesia's transport safety commission to investigate various aspects of the apparent crash, including engineering, operations and weather, Setyo Rahardjo, head of the transport safety commission, told Reuters. "Even if it takes a month we have to keep looking because we have to find this plane. This has become a national issue," Vice President Jusuf Kalla told rescuers in Makassar, Sulawesi's largest city, from where search efforts are being coordinated. "It cannot just disappear like that. If it is in the sea, it will be in the sea. We have to work efficiently." Kalla told about a dozen relatives of passengers the government would step up search operations. "I feel what you feel. Please be patient and let us pray that the plane can be found soon," he told relatives at the military air base. "The search effort must be intensified. We will provide four more helicopters; if necessary, six. We hope in two or three more days we will have a positive result. There is no time limit for the search effort." MOUNTING ANGER Nearly a week after the plane went missing, anger mounted among the relatives, many of whom have been camping near the Adam Air office at the Makassar airport waiting for news about the search. "We have been here for five days with the only clothes that we are wearing," Yunus, whose cousin was on the plane, told Kalla. "If you ask us to pray we have done it since day one. Why don't we ask for more help from more advanced countries like the United States?" The plane left Surabaya on Indonesia's main island of Java on Monday for Manado, provincial capital of North Sulawesi. Among the 96 passengers and six crew were a father and his two daughters from Bend, Oregon. "Ever since I've been here I haven't seen an atmosphere that a disaster has happened. I was tossed here and there. They didn't ask my name," said another relative, Aryodimo. "Even at the information centre there is no information, there is no TV and there are no health posts." The six-member U.S. team consists of officials from the National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing Co. <BA.N> and General Electric <GE.N>. The plane disappeared less than three days after a ferry capsized and sank off Indonesia's main island of Java. A rescue official said about 230 people who were on the ferry had been rescued, but about 400 were unaccounted for. (Additional reporting by Telly Nathalia in Jakarta)
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