Search and rescue teams have found the flight recorder for a Trigana Air passenger aircraft that crashed in eastern Indonesia, killing all 54 on board, according to officials. “At 1:40 local time the Trigana Air black box was found,” Transportation Ministry official Julius Arivada Barata told the Reuters news agency by text message on Tuesday.
Major-General Heronimus Guru, operations director at Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, told a news conference in the capital, Jakarta, on the same day that all passengers on the plane were dead and their remains were being put into body bags and recovered.
Officials have declined to comment on the cause of Sunday’s crash until the results of an investigation by the national transport safety committee, but Guru said the terrain in Indonesia’s easternmost province may have been a factor. “There’s a possibility the aircraft hit a peak and then fell into a ravine because the place that it was found is steep,” Guru said.
Earlier, the National Search and Rescue Agency said the twin turboprop ATR-42-300 probably hit a peak on Sunday before crashing into a ravine in the Bintang Mountains district, about seven nautical miles from Oksibil. ATR is a joint venture between Airbus and Alenia Aermacchi, a subsidiary of Italian aerospace firm Finmeccanica.
