JAKARTA (Antara): Multi-media expert Roy Surya expressed his pessimism that search and rescue team would be able to find the location of an ill-fated plane, which has gone missing since Monday evening.
The plane went missing on its way from East Java provincial capital of Surabaya to North Sulawesi provincial capital of Manado.
He said the signals of emergency locator transmitters (ELTs), which could guide rescuers to locate the plane wreckage would have disappeared at 3 p.m. Wednesday.
He added lifetime of ELT battery is only 48 hours.
"If ELT signal disappeared, the searching of the wreckage will be more difficult because it only depends only on manual-visual method," Roy was quoted by Antara news agency as saying Wednesday.
According to Roy, there are two ELTs -- portable and fixed -- in every plane, which are placed in cockpit and in the tail of the plane.
Meanwhile, rescuers expanded their search for a missing jetliner to the sea Wednesday, one day after senior Indonesian officials erroneously said the Boeing 737's charred wreckage had been found along with a dozen survivors.
Rescue teams spent more than 10 hours Tuesday hiking through slippery forest paths in a mountainous region of Sulawesi's western coast but found nothing, prompting authorities to expand their search Wednesday to include the sea, Bambang Karnoyudho,the head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, told The Associated Press.
Three navy ships set sail soon after sunrise in the Makkasar Strait and five Air Force planes took to the skies, he said, searching for signs of wreckage in the water and in a large section of south and western Sulawesi.
On Tuesday, top Indonesian aviation, military and police officials - and the airline itself - said the plane had been found in a remote part of Sulawesi. They said that 90 people on board had perished, but that the remaining 12 may have survived.
Descriptions were vivid, with officials saying corpses and debris from the plane were scattered over a 300-meter (327-yard) area of forest and jagged cliffs - highlighting the often unreliable and chaotic nature of disaster relief efforts in theworld's largest archipelagic nation.
But later in the day, they said they had been wrong and no wreckage had been found.
No comments:
Post a Comment