Officials stumped by Indonesian airplane crash; search continues

Jan 15, 2007, 5:50 GMT

Jakarta - Investigators said Monday they remained unable to determine why an Indonesian commercial jetliner fell into the sea two weeks ago with 102 people aboard, despite recovering more pieces of wreckage.

'We haven't yet been able to draw a conclusion. It's still too early to say it was a scenario where the plane broke up in mid-air,' Setyo Rahardjo, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT), told a parliamentary hearing.

'There are many possibilities on what happened,' he said, according to the detik.com online news service.

'The number of pieces of wreckages is still too little for the KNKT to conduct an investigation,' Rahardjo said. 'We need at least 60 per cent of the plane's body parts in order to determine the cause of the accident.'

Officials have suggested that the plane may have exploded in mid-air or crashed into the sea and disintegrated.

Authorities were awaiting the arrival of a metal detector and undersea camera from the United States Navy help identify wreckage believed to be scattered on the sea floor. The equipment was expected to arrive in Indonesia on Wednesday.

Investigators from the US National Transportation Safety Board and Boeing Airlines were also in Sulawesi to assist Indonesian authorities.

Indonesian army soldiers in rubber boats, joined by local fishermen and volunteers, continued to comb beaches and waters on the south-west coast of Sulawesi Island for more debris from the Adam Air flight that vanished from radar screens on New Year's Day, said Budi, a rescue official in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.

The search was also focusing on finding the Boeing 737-400's 'black box,' which contains flight recorder data that could explain what caused the disaster, other officials said.

First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, the Air Force commander in South Sulawesi and the search mission's chief, told reporters during the weekend that it was proving difficult to find the black box and fuselage because the Makassar Strait, where the plane is believed to have crashed, has many deep areas.

Small pieces of wreckage from the jetliner have been recovered or washed up on beaches since a fisherman found a tail stabiliser last Wednesday about 300 metres off a beach in the port town of Pare-Pare, South Sulawesi.

On Sunday, rescue workers found fragments of human hair and scalp that might have been from passengers on the Adam Air flight, Budi said, adding that the remains would be sent for DNA testing.

A Singapore Air Force search plane spotted an oil slick in the strait on Sunday, but Rahardjo told lawmakers he was still not sure whether that material was from the doomed aircraft.

'That must be carefully investigated, whether the oil spill came from the missing airliner,' Rahardjo argued.

Flight KI-574 was carrying 96 passengers - including three US citizens - and a crew of six when it disappeared during a scheduled flight from Surabaya, the capital of East Java province, to Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi province.