JAKARTA: Indonesian rescuers on Friday had found the bodies of 10 passengers on a fishery surveillance plane that went missing in Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province at the weekend, the country’s search and rescue agency said.
The ATR 42-500 turboprop owned by aviation group Indonesia Air Transport (IAT) lost contact with air traffic control on Saturday at about 1:30 p.m. local time (0530 GMT) around the Maros region in South Sulawesi.
There were seven crew members and three passengers on board the plane, which was chartered by Indonesia’s Marine Affairs and Fisheries Ministry to conduct air surveillance on its fisheries. The passengers were ministry staff members.
Andi Sultan, an official at South Sulawesi’s rescue agency, said through tears during a video statement that authorities found the ninth and tenth bodies early on Friday, adding that the evacuation process was still ongoing.
The agency said separately on its Instagram account that 10 victims have been found.
Local rescuers previously discovered the wreckage of the plane in different locations around Mount Bulusaraung in the Maros region, about 1,500 km (930 miles) northeast of the sprawling island nation’s capital, Jakarta.
Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT), which probes transport accidents, is currently investigating the contents of the recently-found black box, its chief told local media this week.
It was Indonesia’s first deadly crash involving the ATR 42, manufactured by Franco-Italian planemaker ATR , in more than a decade. In 2015, a Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 crashed into a mountainside in Indonesia’s Papua region, killing all 54 people on board.
A Boeing 737-500 jet operated by airline Sriwijaya Co. crashed into the Java sea in 2021, killing 62 people.
Indonesia finds bodies of 10 passengers on crashed surveillance plane
https://arab.news/5ba35
Indonesia finds bodies of 10 passengers on crashed surveillance plane
- ATR 42-500 turboprop lost contact with air traffic control on Saturday around the Maros region in South Sulawesi
- Local rescuers previously discovered the wreckage of the plane in different locations around Mount Bulusaraung in the Maros region
More than 9,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across much of US
- “Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X
DALLAS: More than 9,000 flights across the US set to take off over the weekend have been canceled as a major storm expected to wreak havoc across much of the country threatens to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways.
Roughly 140 million people were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England.
The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.
Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight were moving toward the central part of the state on Saturday, the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said.
“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X.
Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 24 Celsius.
About 68,000 power outages were reported across the country at 8 a.m. ET, about 27,600 of them in Texas. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.
After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted.
Temperatures reached minus 34 C just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.
