Indonesia plane missing: Boeing lost contact after dropping ‘more than 10,000ft in less than a minute’

A search and rescue operation is under way in Indonesia after contact was lost with a Boeing 737-500 plane on a local flight.

An Indonesian Transport Ministry spokesman said the Sriwijaya Air flight SJ 182 was flying from the capital Jakarta to Pontianak City in West Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo. The last contact was at 2.40pm local time (7.40am in the UK), it said.

Tracking service Flightradar24 said on Twitter that the flight “lost more than 10,000ft (3,000m) of altitude in less than one minute” about four minutes after departure.

The Indonesian Navy has determined the plane’s co-ordinates and ships have been deployed to the location, Navy official Abdul Rasyid said.

Suspected debris has been located in waters north of Jakarta, an official from the Basarnas rescue agency told the Reuters news agency, although it has not been confirmed that it is from the missing plane. Fishermen spotted metal objects believed to be parts of an aircraft in the Thousand Islands, a chain of islands north of Jakarta, on Saturday afternoon.

Friends and relatives of people on the flight have been seen in television footage praying and hugging each other as they wait for news at the airports in Jakarta and Pontianak airport.

Some 62 people were on board, including crew. Ten of the passengers were children, the rescue agency said.

In its latest statement, the airline said it was still gathering information on the incident.

“Sriwijaya Air is still in contact with various related parties to get more detailed information regarding the SJ-182 flight from Jakarta to Pontianak,” the company said.

“Management is still communicating and investigating this matter and will immediately issue an official statement after obtaining the actual information.”

Indonesian Transportation Ministry spokesperson Adita Irawati said: “The missing plane is currently under investigation and under co-ordination with the National Search and Rescue Agency and the National Transportation Safety Committee.”

A spokeswoman for Boeing said: “We are aware of media reports from Jakarta, and are closely monitoring the situation. We are working to gather more information.”

A plane flying from Jakarta to Pontianak would spend most of the 90-minute flight over the Java Sea. Sriwijaya Air is one of Indonesia’s discount carriers, flying to dozens of domestic and international destinations.

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago nation, with more than 260 million people.

The missing plane is not a Boeing 737 Max, the model involved in two major accidents in recent years – the first of which involved a crash in Indonesia.

The Lion Air 737 MAX, carrying 189 passengers and crew, crashed into the Java Sea just minutes after taking off from Jakarta in October 2018, killing everyone on board.

It was the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since 1997, when 234 people were killed on a Garuda flight near Medan on Sumatra island.

And in December 2014, an AirAsia flight from Surabaya to Singapore crashed into the sea, killing 162 people.

Courtesy of Sky News

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13 people killed when Indonesian C-130 cargo plane hits mountain

Indonesian soldiers examining the Hercules military plane A-1334 that crashed in Wamena on December 18, 2016. © Handout / Search and rescue team / AFP

All 13 people on board a Hercules C-130 plane owned by the Indonesian Air Force died after it crashed into a mountain near the town of Wamena in the eastern Papua province not far from the airport on Sunday.

 

The US-made transport plane departed from the city of Timika at 22:35 GMT and was set to arrive at Wamena airport at 23:13 GMT. However, contact with the aircraft was lost some ten minutes before the scheduled landing, and search and rescue crews were dispatched to the area.

 

The rescuers who arrived to the crash site about an hour later found no survivors. The jet reportedly hit a mountain called Lisuwa at about 23:15 GMT, Ahmad Riski Titus, operational director of Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency said, as cited by Reuters. 

 

The bodies of 13 people, all of whom were members of Indonesian Air Force, including three pilots, were recovered and transferred to Wamena. 

 

No official explanation for the incident has yet been given. It was reported that the pilot might have lost control due to bad weather conditions. 

 

“Preliminary estimates indicate that this accident occurred because of the weather, but this should not be a benchmark,” Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force Marshal Hadiyan Sumintaatmadja told a press conference, in which he sent condolences to the families of the victims.

 

“Apologies to all the people of Indonesia on this tragedy that we did not want to happen. We pray for the souls of the soldiers accepted by Allah, the Almighty God,” he said, as cited by the Rappler.

 

According to Hadiyan, the plane was on a test mission.

 

According to Hadiyan, the plane was on a test mission.

 

Earlier in December, a plane operated by the Indonesian police crashed into the water near the Riau Islands, killing 12 people.

 

Last June, another Indonesian C-130 crashed in a residential area of the city of Medan in North Sumatra province, destroying a hotel and killing a total of 141 people, including the crew.

Courtesy of rt.com

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Indian Military Plane Goes Missing Over Sea

India’s air force says it has lost contact with a transport plane carrying 29 people that has gone missing in the Bay of Bengal.

 

The AN-32 aircraft took off from Tambaram base in Chennai at 8.30am local time, and was due to touch down at the Port Blair military base in the Andaman and Nicobar islands at 11.20am.

 

The flight was supposed to last three hours but the control tower said it lost all contact with the aircraft about 15 minutes after take-off at a height of 21,000 feet.

 

The Defence Ministry tweeted: “Full scale search and rescue launched to look for an IAF AN-32 overdue at Port Blair since 1130 hrs. Max assets being deployed at earliest.”

 

Indian Navy spokesperson DK Sharma said: “As of now we will term it as overdue. A full scale search and rescue mission has been launched.”

 

According to the Defence Ministry the aircraft was last detected east of Chennai and made a left turn with a rapid loss of height. 

 

Details of the passengers on board have not yet been released, but the ministry confirmed there were 21 military personnel including six crew, and some family members of soldiers deployed on the islands.

 

The plane went through an upgrade last September, but this month had reported a pressure leak from the port door, a hydraulic leak and sluggish throttle.

 

Sky’s Neville Lazarus, in Delhi, said: “The plane was 150 miles into its route when it went missing and four surveillance planes, 12 ships and a submarine are involved in the rescue and search operation.

 

“The Indian government isn’t taking any chances and they’ve pushed into service all the fleet available to them for this.

 

“We have to bear in mind we are in the midst of the monsoon season with low visibility and also very high winds with rain all over this vast area of water that is the Bay of Bengal.”

 

The AN-32 is a Russian-made aircraft and is the main work horse of the Indian air force – they can fly for four hours without refuelling.

 

There are about 100 of these planes in the defence forces.

 

In one of the worst disasters involving an AN-32 in India, 20 people died and three civilians were burnt to death when a plane crashed near a New Delhi airport in 1999.

Courtesy of Sky News

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EgyptAir Crash: Plane Wreckage Found Near Greek Island

 

Wreckage of EgyptAir flight MS804 has been found south of the Greek island of Karpathos, Egyptian aviation officials confirmed.

 

The Airbus A320 was en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 passengers and crew when it went down overnight.

 

Egyptian Vice-President Ahmed Adel told CNN the rescue operation was “turning into a search and recovery”.

 

Officials say the plane is more likely to have been brought down by a terrorist act than a technical fault.

 

It made two sharp turns and dropped more than 25,000ft (7,620m) before plunging into the Mediterranean Sea, Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos told reporters.

 

Search teams in the area have sighted debris from the plane, including life jackets.

 

“There have been finds south-east of Crete, inside the Cairo flight information area,” Greek army general staff spokesman Vassilis Beletsiotis told AFP news agency.

 

The search in seas south of the Greek island of Karpathos involves Greek and Egyptian naval forces, and the British Royal Air Force.

 

Sixty-six people were on board Flight MS804, most of them from Egypt and France. A Briton was among the passengers.

 

Of those on the plane, 56 were passengers, seven were crew members and three were security personnel.

 

Relatives of some of those on board are being flown from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport to Cairo.

 

Flight MS804 left Charles de Gaulle at 23:09 local time on Wednesday (21:09 GMT) and was scheduled to arrive in the Egyptian capital soon after 03:15 local time on Thursday.

 

Greek aviation officials say air traffic controllers spoke to the pilot when he entered Greek airspace and everything appeared normal.

 

They tried to contact him again at 02:27 Cairo time, as the plane was set to enter Egyptian airspace, but “despite repeated calls, the aircraft did not respond”. Two minutes later it vanished from radar.

 

Mr Kammenos said: “The picture we have at the moment on the accident as it emerges from the Greek air force operations centre is that the aircraft was approximately 10-15 miles inside the Egyptian FIR [flight information region] and at an altitude of 37,000 feet.

 

“It turned 90 degrees left and then a 360-degree turn toward the right, dropping from 37,000 to 15,000 feet and then it was lost at about 10,000 feet.”

 

Egyptian Aviation Minister Sherif Fathi said: “Let’s not try to jump to the side that is trying to identify this as a technical failure – on the contrary.

 

“If you analyse the situation properly, the possibility of having a different action, or having a terror attack, is higher than the possibility of having a technical [fault].”

 

In October an Airbus A321 operated by Russia’s Metrojet blew up over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, with the deaths of all 224 people on board. Sinai Province, a local affiliate of the Islamic State jihadist group, said it had smuggled a bomb on board.

Courtesy of BBC News

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Medevac plane with seven on board disappears off Senegal

A medical evacuation plane with seven people on board, including a French patient, disappeared off the coast of Senegal on Saturday night during a flight from Burkina Faso to Dakar, the Senegalese civil aviation authority said on Sunday.

 

The private Senegalair plane flying from Ouagadougou dropped off radar screens at 7:08 p.m. (1908 GMT), 118 km (74 miles) west of the Senegalese capital, the aviation authority said in a statement.

 

“The search is still going on but it hasn’t been fruitful so far and we will probably continue it tomorrow,” said Magueye Marame Ndao, head of the authority.

 

“We reckon the last point at which contact with radar was lost was 60 nautical miles (111 km) off the coast of Dakar,” Ndao said, adding that three planes and a naval ship were involved in the search.

 

The plane was carrying three crew members, a doctor and two nurses as well as the patient. Those on board included two Algerians and a citizen of Congo, the aviation authority said, without specifying if that meant Democratic Republic of Congo or Republic of Congo.

 

The plane, chartered by ambulance service SOS Medecin Senegal, left Ouagadougou at 4:30 p.m. (1630 GMT), Burkina Faso’s minister of transport, Daouda Traore, told Reuters. Ouagadougou is around 1,700 km (1,100 miles) southeast of Dakar.

Courtesy of news.yahoo.com

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Indonesian airplane with 54 on board missing in Papua region

Missing AirAsia plane: Third major Malaysian air incident of 2014

Today’s incident involving the AirAsia plane which has gone missing is the latest in a number of major air incidents this year, and the third involving Malaysia.

 

The Malaysia-based AirAsia, which has dominated cheap travel in the region for years, has never lost a plane before.

 

On March 8, Malaysia Airlines flight 370, a wide-bodied Boeing 777, went missing soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.

 

It remains missing until this day with 239 people in one of the biggest aviation mysteries.

 

Another Malaysia Airlines flight, also a Boeing 777, was shot down over rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine while on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17. A total of 298 people on board were killed.

 

The crew’s request for a change of route was strange as there “didn’t seem to be anything unusual” according to a US air crash search and rescue expert.

 

The search has now been called off until the morning.

Courtesy of Press and Journal

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Nigerian Air Force plane missing in Adamawa

An Alpha Jet (NAF 466) belonging to the Nigerian Air Force is missing around Adamawa State.

 

According to a statement signed by Director of Defence Information, Major General Chris Olukolade, “The aircraft, with two pilots onboard, left Yola at about 10:45am on 12 September 2014 on a routine operational mission and was expected back by 12:00 noon.

 

“Since then, all efforts to establish contact with the aircraft have not yielded any positive result. Meanwhile, search and rescue effort is ongoing to establish contact with the crew”. 

 

“In view of the foregoing, you are please requested to disseminate this information through your news medium for the awareness of the general public.

 

“Thank you for your usual cooperation”, the statement added.

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Plane has crashed; Search teams dispatched in Rabbit Ears Pass area, Colorado, USA

A plane which took off from Steamboat Springs bound for Boulder has apparently crashed.

Search teams Saturday night were making their way toward the crash located east of Steamboat Springs in the Harrison drainage southwest of Walton Peak, a 10,544-foot mountain.

Allen Kenitzer, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the plane was a Piper PA-28 with two people on board.

The Harrison drainage is in the Rabbit Ears Pass area, according to Jim Linville, incident commander for Routt County Search and Rescue.

“A Civil Air Patrol plane has spotted the aircraft,” said Linville. “We cannot confirm which aircraft it is because we haven’t been to it on the ground.

“But in all probability the plane that is missing and the plane they have seen is the same plane,” Linville added. “It is on Rabbit Ears Pass and we are sending three teams into the field right now. It is a very difficult area to get to.”

Linville said it is an area where there have been three previous plane crashes over the years.

“Planes leaving Steamboat don’t realize they have to gain more altitude before they go up that drainage and that’s where they end up. That has happened several times,” said Linville.

He said the CAP plane had picked up a signal from the downed aircraft.

“The Civil Air Patrol plane did that. They got the signal from the plane and then they were able to spot the fuselage,” said Linville.

 

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