TRAVEL NEWS
Jakarta | Associated Press
January 02, 2007

Indonesian Airliner Crashes; 90 Are Killed, but 12 Survive


Destinations Rescuers found the smoldering wreckage Tuesday of an Indonesian jetliner that went missing during a storm and crashed. Officials said 90 people were killed but 12 survived in the country's second disaster in days.

On Friday, the sinking of a passenger ferry in the Java Sea left 400 people dead or missing. Nearly 200 survivors have been found.

The Boeing 737 operated by the local carrier Adam Air crashed in a mountainous region of Sulawesi island in the northeast of the sprawling nation, said Col. Genot Hariyanto, the local police chief. A spokesman for Adam Air, Hartonom, who uses one name, said that 90 people were killed and that there were 12 survivors. The United States Embassy in Jakarta said there were three Americans on board. Officials said rescuers were trying to evacuate survivors, but there was no word on their condition.

The plane was on a domestic flight from Java island to Sulawesi when it disappeared late Monday about an hour before it was due to land in bad weather. The captain managed to send out two distress signals, the national aviation chief, Ichsan Tatang, said late Monday.

Hundreds of people gathered at the airport in Manado seeking information about their missing relatives.

Justin Tumurang, 25, was waiting at the airport to pick up her twin sister, but she never arrived. “Being a twin, we share almost every feeling,” she said. “I felt something was not right, and it grew worse. Now I feel pain.”

The 17-year-old plane carried six crew and 96 passengers, including 11 children. Three on board were foreign citizens, the airline said.
Adam Air is one of at least a dozen budget airlines that have emerged in Indonesia since 1999, when the industry was deregulated. The rapid expansion has led to cheap flights to scores of destinations around the sprawling nation, but has raised some safety concerns, since many of the airlines are small and lease planes that are decades old.



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