Contact lost with Indonesian jet

[Mohd Idham 0]

Saw those already at another thread...

[Edwin Yii 0]

oops wasnt aware..just del or merge if necessary

[Tamizi Hj Tamby 1]

Thanks for the link,Edwin.

 

Now Adam Air reputation is on stake,due to its bad maintenance practice.

[Mohd Idham 0]

Sad news...what only remains is debris....

[Rozhan 0]

It would be in the interest of many parties, especially Boeing as the manufacturer, to know what actually happened to cause this crash. I understand Boeing, as with other manufacturers, tests its products to the extreme and beyond what an aircraft will ever encounter during service. A plane doesn't fall out of the sky just like that.

 

[Pieter C. 5]

oops wasnt aware..just del or merge if necessary

 

Have merged the 2 topics: original was posted here as #15/01jan2007...

[Pieter C. 5]

Indonesian Troops Search Beaches For Plane Debris

 

January 14, 2007

Indonesian troops combed beaches over the weekend for more debris from a missing Indonesian airliner, an official leading the search said, hoping for more clues to piece together what happened to the jet.

 

Mostly small parts of the Adam Air Boeing 737-400 that vanished from radar screens on New Year's Day with 102 people aboard were found in the past few days at roughly the same location, floating in the sea or washed up on beaches.

 

Officials have suggested the plane may have crashed into the sea off the west coast of Sulawesi island, disintegrating into small pieces.

 

Despite the possibility that the Boeing had broken up, Indonesian navy ships assisted by a US oceanographic ship have been trying to locate its fuselage, which could still house the flight recorder that could provide clues to explain the disaster.

 

"We want to find the plane's main body and the black box. We know that the Makassar Strait can go as deep as 1,700 metres (5,600 ft) and we need more sophisticated equipment to locate the plane's body," said search mission chief First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto.

 

Suyanto told reporters, police and military troops would keep scouring the shore for other items belonging to the doomed plane.

 

The fisherman who discovered the first piece of the missing Indonesian plane was given on Saturday a cash prize of INR50 million rupiah (USD$5,500) from authorities.

 

Bakri Hapipah found the plane's tail stabilizer snarled in a fishing net 300 metres (980 ft) from the shore.

 

"I want to get a bigger fishing boat. A motorized one. I still want to be a fisherman," the 45 year-old told reporters when asked what he wanted to do with the cash. "I hope (the passengers) can be found soon," he added.

 

He found the one metre long piece on Tuesday but initially stored it under his stilted house because he thought it was only a slab of plywood, before a neighbor persuaded him to report it to the police a day later.

 

Since then, a life vest, food trays, wing shreds, seat cushions and interior material have also been recovered by residents, military and police in the sea and on the shores around the seaside town of Pare Pare.

 

But none of them had been as big or as significant as the tail stabilizer which had a distinctive serial number.

 

The 17-year-old plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather on New Year's Day. The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over crosswinds.

 

(Reuters)

 

[Chan CS 0]

The family of those victims are those who suffer the most, waiting waiting and waiting... R.I.P....

[Teoh Z Yao 0]

Reading again this thread after several days makes me feel sorry once again for the victims and the families...

 

My condolence...

[Naim 6]

January 22, 2007 22:32 PM

Search For Indonesian Airliner Wreckage To Continue

 

KUTA (Bali), Jan 22 (Bernama) -- The Indonesian government has allowed the search for the wreckage of Adam Air airliner that crashed on Jan 1 to extend beyond three weeks.

 

However, Vice President Jusuf Kalla said that the search that had exceeded the standard timeframe for a search and rescue operation of seven days, would not continue forever.

 

"Surely, there is a time limit because it's impossible to continue searching for a year," he was quoted by local electronic media as saying at the Makassar Airport en route to Manado.

 

He said the search must end after a certain period but the period had not been determined.

 

The Boeing 737-400 with 102 passengers and crew went missing during a flight from Surabaya to Manado in North Sulawesi and so far, 150 pieces of the aircraft had been found.

 

The search has been reported to cost US$200,000 a week.

 

-- BERNAMA

[H Azmal 0]

Have they even recovered at least one body yet?

[Naim 6]

Have they even recovered at least one body yet?

 

I think they found some hair stuck to plane furniture, or something. That's about it.

 

+++

 

[Naim 6]

January 23, 2007 17:52 PM

 

British Ship To Help Search For Missing Adam Air Plane

 

By Mohd Nasir Yusoff

 

JAKARTA, Jan 23 (Bernama) -- The British government has sent a ship to help locate for the missing Adam Air jetliner which was believed to have crashed at sea on Jan 1, an Indonesian official said today.

 

"Starting today, a British ship will help us search for the missing passenger aircraft in the Makassar Straits," National search and rescue (SAR) team chairman Bambang Karnoyudho said.

 

Bambang as quoted by Antara news agency from Makassar, however, did not go into the details of the ship but only said it belonged to the British military.

 

A fleet of Indonesian ships that have been tasked to find the jetliner which went missing together with 102 people on board have focussed their efforts to find fuselage and a black box of the ill-fated plane based on data obtained by sonar of KRI Fatahillah, KRI Nala and KRI Pulau Rupat warships.

 

The SAR efforts have been focussed in West Sulawesi waters as hundreds of remnants of the missing plane have been widely found between Majene area and Parepare area in neighbouring South Sulawesi province for the past two weeks.

 

Meanwhile, Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) of Singapore, which helped Indonesian research ship Baruna Jaya ship to trace the missing aircraft, has left Makassar for Singapore as equipment brought by the Singaporean ship failed to detect the underwater locator beacon (ULB) of Adam Air jetliner's black box.

 

Joint SAR team coordinator Eddy Suyanto said the team had collected 193 pieces of the wreckage, of which 154 were already identified as parts belonging to the missing jetliner.

 

Vice President Jusuf Kalla said on Monday the search for Adam Air jetliner should be completed within a certain time limit but the deadline had yet to be decided.

 

According to the existing rule, the search for the missing airliner should have ended but the government allowed the National Search and Rescue Board (Basarnas) to continue its efforts to locate the ill-fated plane following the findings of its parts.

 

Adam Air president director Adam Aditya Suherman said in Jakarta on Monday Adam Air planned to give a Rp500 million in compensation to each passenger of its B737-400 plane.

 

"The amount is apart from the insurance payment from Jasa Rahardja totalling Rp40 to Rp50 million per passenger. This is from us," he told a hearing with the House of Representatives Commission V.

 

Adam Air's commercial director, Gudi Pinggua Saputra, meanwhile said that compensation for the crew members would be higher than for the passengers, but stopped short of mentioning the amount.

 

Suherman said that the compensation would be paid as soon as the authorities decided to stop the search.

 

--BERNAMA

[Naim 6]

Some development, at last.

 

BBC

Last Updated: Thursday, 25 January 2007, 14:26 GMT

 

Indonesia jet 'black boxes' found

 

A US ship has located the "black box" flight recorders of the Indonesian plane that went missing on 1 January, the US embassy said.

 

The USNS Mary Sears, which has been helping hunt for the missing Boeing 737, detected a distinctive signal from the boxes on the ocean floor.

 

The Adam Air flight, which went missing halfway through its flight from Java to Sulawesi, had 102 people on board.

 

Parts of the plane have been washed up off the west coast of Sulawesi.

 

The Mary Sears located signals "on the same frequency" as the flight recorders of the missing plane, the US embassy in Jakarta said in a statement.

 

The ship also "detected heavy debris scattered over a wide area", which is being analysed to verify whether it is the missing aircraft, the statement added.

 

 

HUNT FOR MISSING JET

1 Jan: Plane goes missing

2 Jan: Reports that wreckage has been found prove false

3 Jan: Search resumes

5 Jan: Search area is expanded

8 Jan: Metal spotted in sea

10 Jan: US ship joins search

11 Jan: Fishermen find debris

25 Jan: Flight recorders found

 

 

Information from the flight recorders could help investigators determine the cause of the crash.

 

Officials said the government would now have to decide whether to try and retrieve the boxes from the ocean bed.

 

"We do not have the technology to retrieve the black boxes," Setio Rahardjo, chairman of the National Commission on Transport Safety told AFP news agency.

 

"Assuming we have the funds, then we have to ask for a country who has sophisticated technology, such as the US," he added.

 

Meanwhile, the search has entered the fourth week in the Java Sea for a ferry which sank at the end of December - about 300 passengers are still missing.

[Chan CS 0]

Well still yet to be decided whether to retrieve or not...... OMG.....

 

Any idea how much does it cost?

[Min Chun 0]

Another similar one from BERNAMA..

 

Missing Adam Air Plane Blackbox Detected

January 24, 2007 23:55 PM

 

 

By Mohd Nasir Yusoff

 

JAKARTA, Jan 24 (Bernama) -- The "Black Box" flight data recorder of a missing Adam Air jetliner has been detected in the Majene waters off West Sulawesi.

 

The flight data recorder, detected by the United States vessel Mary Sears, will be able to provide clues to unravel the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Boeing 737-400 aircraft while on a flight from Surabaya in Java to Manado in Sulawesi on Jan 1.

 

The plane was carrying 96 passengers and six crew.

 

The "Black Box" was detected at 8 am (local time) and the information was conveyed Wednesday via radio communication by an Indonesian navy personnel acting as liaison officer aboard Mary Sears.

 

However, there has been no verification on the find from Indonesian First Admiral Gatot Sudijanto, the commandant of the naval base in Makassar, Sulawesi.

 

An Indonesian vessel, KRI Fatahillah, is reportedly approaching the Mary Sears which will leave for Singapore to return the locator that was used to detect the data recorder.

 

A senior Indonesian marine official was quoted as saying that sophisticated equipment necessary to retrieve the data recorder from the seabed at a depth of 1,200 to 2,000 metres was not available in any Asian country.

 

Meanwhile, the search has entered the fourth week in the Java Sea for the KM Senopati Nusantara passenger vessel which sank on Dec 30, resulting in about 300 passengers still missing.

 

-- BERNAMA

[Naim 6]

Another analysis.

 

The International Herald Tribune

Published: January 30, 2007

 

Indonesian airline Adam Air had safety issues before crash

By Donald Greenlees

 

HONG KONG: Soon after Adam Air started flying three years ago in

Indonesia, its revenue and passenger growth was nothing short of

explosive in a country whose huge population, scattered over an

archipelago of thousands of islands, offered exciting potential for

the airline industry.

 

But the growth of Adam Air disguised persistent concerns among some of

its own pilots and aviation experts over its safety practices,

including how planes were maintained and operated.

 

On New Year's Day, Adam Air's run of good fortune came to a tragic

halt.

 

Flight KI-574, flying from Surabaya, on Java Island, to Manado, on

Sulawesi Island, disappeared in bad weather with 102 people aboard. It

took 10 days for any trace of wreckage to be found.

 

In the latest news from the search, signals from plane's emergency

locator beacon were detected from a location about 1,700 meters —

roughly one mile — below the surface of the ocean. Indonesia has said

that it has no equipment capable of reaching such a depth and has

asked for international help.

 

Whether the cause of the Jan. 1 crash was due to pilot error or safety

or maintenance issues is unknown because most of the wreckage is still

lying on the seabed.

 

But Adam Air had a history of safety incidents and the loss of this

flight adds to Indonesia's dismal safety record — one of the world's

worst. According to several investigators involved in looking at the

crash, pilots complained repeatedly about problems with the 17-

year-old Boeing 737-400 that crashed.

 

Two of the dozens of complaints were about the plane's weather radar,

an item of particular concern since investigators have determined that

the plane flew straight into a violent storm before it went down.

Normally, pilots would make almost any possible maneuver to avoid

flying into the heart of a thunderstorm.

 

By far the largest number of complaints concerned instruments that

would tell one of the two crew members whether the plane was going up

or down, and whether the plane was maintaining its course. So many

complaints, called write-ups, were received from so many pilots that

investigators have begun to ask whether any effort was made to repair

the problems.

 

The vertical-speed indicator on the left side of the cockpit, the

captain's side, collected by far the greatest number of complaints —

48 — in the three months before the crash, the investigators said. The

vertical-speed indicator tells how fast the plane is climbing or

descending.

 

Pilots complained 30 times about anomalies in the plane's left-right

inertial reference system, which helps tell which direction the plane

is turning. Problems with a fuel differential light drew 15

complaints. There were numerous complaints about inoperative cockpit

instrument lights.

 

There were also several pilot write- ups about wing flaps that stayed

stuck at an angle of 25 degrees.

 

On Tuesday, a spokesman for the airline could not be reached to

respond to these specific complaints. The company said earlier it

maintained and operated its planes according to the guidelines of

Indonesian regulators and the manufacturer.

 

After it started flying in late 2003, the airline promised travelers

that it would be more scrupulous than the competition when it came to

ensuring the reliability of its fleet of 19 Boeing 737s. Management

boasted that it viewed the high cost of maintenance as an investment,

not an expense.

 

Yet there were signals that the promises were not matched by practice.

 

On Aug. 22, Gerry Soejatman, a former aviation consultant, posted a

commentary on prominent aviation Web sites, including airlines.net,

that cited a long list of inadequate maintenance by Adam Air and

warned that action needed to be taken to prevent one of its jets

becoming "a smoking hole in the ground."

 

At the time, a number of pilots were in dispute with management over

employment conditions, including aircraft safety practices, and had

already left the airline.

 

One of those pilots, Sutan Salahuddin, 35, said in an interview that

he had resigned in 2005, after being ordered more than once to fly a

plane that he believed had not been properly certified as airworthy.

 

Adam Air management rejected all the allegations as untrue. The

airline's director of safety, Hartono, said that the airline

maintained and operated its fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft in strict

accordance with the requirements of Indonesian regulators and the

manufacturer.

 

But Salahuddin described a tense conversation with one of the owners

of Adam Air just before he quit, in which he was ordered to fly an

aircraft while one of its two inertial reference units — central

components of the navigation system — was not working.

 

The plane had not been cleared to fly by an Adam Air flight engineer

because the broken part had been placed on a "hot item list" and the

period in which it was legally permitted to fly with the part

inoperable had expired, the pilot said.

 

Salahuddin said Adam Air had requested a waiver letter from regulators

to allow the plane to fly, but the letter had not arrived by the time

he was due to take off from Jakarta for the short haul to Padang in

Sumatra.

 

Salahuddin said that because of the delay, Sandra Ang, who heads the

Indonesian-Chinese family that owns and manages Adam Air, called him

in the cockpit and told him to fly the plane.

 

He gave the following account of their exchange.

 

"I told Mrs. Sandra, 'Ma'am, it would be illegal if I go ahead to fly

this aircraft. If I fly without the waiver letter, and the government

does a ramp check on the ground, they would revoke my license. On top

of that, there is a broken part. We have to repair it right away, not

put it off again and again.'"

 

Ang told Salahuddin that the airline did not have the spare parts yet,

to which he replied that the plane was "grounded."

 

"And she said, 'But there are lots of passengers.' I told her, 'If the

other IRU also broke down, I would lose all my navigation system. We

could end up somewhere else.'

 

"And she responded, 'Just go ahead, fly the plane. I'll take care of

the rest.'" Salahuddin said he refused to fly and the flight was

delayed until the government delivered the waiver.

 

Hartono, the Adam Air director of safety, said he did not work at the

airline at the time, but that if Salahuddin came forward with the

details he would investigate.

 

As crash investigators continue their work, there are likely to be

many questions posed about the safety performance of Adam Air and the

Indonesian airline industry in general. Other major airlines in the

country, like Lion, Boraq, Mandala, Merpati and Garuda, have

contributed over the past decade to one of the worst aviation safety

records in the world.

 

One issue for investigators and regulators will be the quality of

government oversight of Indonesia's airlines. Following the death of

26 people in a crash involving the budget airline Lion Air in 2004,

the government carried out audits of Indonesia's 22 carriers, halted

the issuance of new airline licenses and ordered improvements to

airport infrastructure.

 

The audit results were never released. But in an interview, Setio

Rahardjo, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety

Committee, said, "We know that some of the airlines do not have a

proper maintenance system," in reference to the situation at the time

of the audits.

 

Rahardjo said that the government's latest answer to an aviation

disaster is to create a tougher and more independent capability for

auditing airlines. But he said there was "still a big question mark"

over how the efficient and effective new audit measures would be.

 

Don Phillips contributed reporting from Washington and Sari Sudarsono

from Jakarta.

 

The International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com

[H Azmal 0]

Adam Air - one of those Insha Allah airlines?

Edited January 31, 2007 by H Azmal

[Pieter C. 5]

Good in-depth article in IHT, but very shocking to read about all this, especially how Sandra is 'responding'

[Pieter C. 5]

Search Restarts For Crash Plane's Black Box

 

August 23, 2007

A US-operated salvage ship has arrived at the coastal area where an Indonesian plane crashed with 102 passengers on board, and will try to recover the aircraft's black box, an airline official said on Thursday.

 

The Boeing 737-400, operated by budget carrier Adam Air, went down on New Year's day in the sea off south Sulawesi in one of the country's worst air disasters.

 

No survivors were found, and while wreckage from the plane showed up weeks after the crash, the black box has never been retrieved, making it difficult to determine the cause of the disaster.

 

A US navy ship with specialized equipment detected signals in January which were thought to be from the plane's flight recorder, when the ship was part of the search for the missing plane.

 

Adam Air spokesman Danke Sudrajat said that crew from the salvage ship would first survey the area where the plane crashed off Sulawesi island.

 

"It is our moral commitment to have the black box retrieved," Sudrajat said, adding that the survey would take several days.

 

Efforts to recover the black box, which refers to the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, were delayed due to disagreements between the government and Adam Air over who should bear the cost.

 

Experts said in January that retrieving the flight recorder, set up to give off a signal for 30 days to aid detection, may be difficult as it could be at a depth of up to 1,700 metres (5,600 feet).

 

Locating the black box may be even tougher now as it may have shifted position or been covered by sediment.

 

The 17-year-old plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather. The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over crosswinds.

 

(Reuters)

 

[Naim 6]

Tuesday, 28 August 2007, 06:57 GMT 07:57 UK

BBC

 

Indonesia jet black boxes found

 

The flight recorders from an Indonesian airliner that crashed on New Year's Day with 102 people on board have been recovered, officials say.

 

The discovery of the so-called black boxes comes after a US-operated ship arrived last week to help the search.

 

The Adam Air Boeing 737 was flying between Java and Sulawesi when it came down off the Sulawesi coast in one of Indonesia's worst air disasters.

 

The body of the plane is believed to be at a depth of 1,700m (5,600ft).

 

Despite a massive search, no bodies have ever been found although some wreckage made its way to the surface in the weeks following the crash.

 

While a signal from the black boxes was thought to have been heard soon after the crash, their retrieval has been held up by disagreements between the government and the airline over who should pay for it.

 

False leads

 

"They have retrieved two black boxes," Tatang Kurniadi, of the National Transportation Safety Commission, said on Tuesday.

 

He said the data recorders - which include vital information about the flight and conversations in the cockpit - had been sent to Makassar port in Sulawesi and would be heading to the US for analysis.

 

 

"God willing they are still readable," he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.

 

He was speaking after a salvage ship operated by US firm Phoenix International joined the search off Sulawesi island last week.

 

The plane disappeared after battling strong winds and twice changing course during a flight from Surabaya in Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi on 1 January 2007.

 

A massive air, land and sea operation got under way with several other countries offering help with the search.

 

But the hunt was hampered by bad weather as well as false leads. The government had to apologise for erroneously saying, soon after the plane's disappearance, that the wreckage had been found.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6966243.stm

 

===

 

Black boxes from downed Indonesian plane recovered

 

By Indonesia correspondent Geoff Thompson

 

Black box data recorders from an Adam Air jet have been found, eight months after the plane crashed in Indonesia killing all 102 people aboard.

 

The recorders were found almost 1.5 kilometres apart.

 

On New Years Day, Adam Air Flight KI 574 suddenly went missing off South Sulawesi during a flight from Surabaya to Manado.

 

The budget airline jet had fallen out of the sky over the sea and there were concerns that the plane's data recorders would never be recovered.

 

Indonesia's National Transport Safety Committee says they were found with the help of a US-operated ship.

 

The flight data recorder was recovered two kilometres under the sea while the voice cockpit recorder was found 1.4 kilometres away at a depth of 1,900 metres.

 

The boxes are being sent to the United States for analysis.

 

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/28/...?section=justin

 

===

[Pieter C. 5]

Black Box Retrieved From Crashed Indonesian 737

 

August 28, 2007

A salvage company has retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from an Indonesian Boeing 737 that crashed into the ocean in January with 102 people on board, officials said on Tuesday.

 

The 737-400, operated by budget carrier Adam Air, went down on New Year's day in the sea off south Sulawesi in one of the country's worst air disasters.

 

An underwater robot scouring the sea off Majene on Sulawesi retrieved the flight data recorder on Monday and cockpit voice recorder on Tuesday, said Tatang Kurniadi, chief of the Indonesian Transport Safety Commission.

 

The two devices were found at a depth of around 2,000 metres (6,500 ft) and were 1,400 metres apart, he said.

 

The search effort was conducted by the US seabed salvage company, Phoenix International, in cooperation with the US National Transport Safety Board and the Indonesian commission.

 

"The blackbox will be sent to Washington for analysis," Kurniadi told a news conference in Jakarta. The analysis to try to determine the cause of the accident could take months, he added.

 

The black box refers to the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

 

Efforts to recover the black box were delayed due to disagreements between the government and Adam Air over who should bear the cost.

 

The 17-year-old plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather. The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over crosswinds.

 

(Reuters)

 

Why took it almost nine month to retrieve them ? Just the cost (or also a cover-up ?)...

 

[Pieter C. 5]

Adam Air Sales Revive After Crash

 

September 11, 2007

Indonesian budget carrier, Adam Air, has seen its passenger numbers rebound after slumping by around a third following a fatal plane crash earlier this year, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

 

Danke Dradjat, head of corporate communications at Adam Air, was quoted by The Jakarta Post as saying the number of passengers in the last few months had gradually picked up.

 

"There was a slowdown in the month following the crash, but it was brief and we managed to get back our passengers over the following three months, with a gradual increase of 10 percent per month," Dradjat said.

 

He added that Adam Air, which now carries between 450,000 and 600,000 passengers a month, lost around 30 percent of its passengers following the crash.

 

A Boeing 737-400 plane operated by Adam Air crashed on New Year's Day with 102 people aboard. The 17-year-old plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it crashed into the sea with all presumed dead.

 

(Reuters)