• Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta correspondent
• January 04, 2007, The Australian
FOUL weather forced search and rescue teams out of the skies yesterday as the mystery deepened over what became of Adam Air Flight KI 574, the budget jet that disappeared between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sulawesi on Monday with 102 people on board.
Equally baffling was how the Boeing 737-400's wreckage was erroneously reported discovered, complete with 12 survivors, by villagers in a mountainous region of West Sulawesi on Tuesday.
Rescue teams dispatched to the area trekked for 10 hours along mud-soaked trails only to find a furious village chief who denied having alerted authorities to the plane crash.
Transport Minister Hatta Radjasa, fending off accusations of incompetence and calls for his resignation, blamed the early incorrect information on the head of Lanud Hasanuddin airport in Makassar, South Sulawesi.
Airport chief Eddy Suyanto was caught on the hop delivering the latest crash position updates to national search and rescue co-ordinators, and inadvertently let slip the location when quizzed by reporters, Mr Radjasa said.
However, no one was prepared to explain why the information was not checked in the first place, with the effective loss of at least a full day's search time. The search was widened to include the Makassar strait on the assumption pilot Refri Agustian Widodo might have sought a safe route around a dangerously large cumulonimbus cloud mass and 40-knot wind gusts.
Mr Suyanto said nothing had been found and military search aircraft had been grounded as monsoonal storms worsened.
An irritated President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono summoned the key players to a crisis meeting in Jakarta last night, including Mr Radjasa, who was forced to return from his damage-control holding position in Makassar.
"The Government has lied to the people. Hatta must be investigated," said Rendry Lamajidu, a senior member of the national parliamentary committee on transportation.
As well as the time wasted trekking to the wrong location, the long delay in launching a search for the jet when it first disappeared from radar screens shortly after 3pm local time (6pm AEST) on Monday was a crucial failure, Mr Lamajidu said.
"There were no direct efforts in the first 24 hours, when there could still have been passengers to save. Now it's not possible there's anyone left," he said.
Upper house Speaker Hidayat Nurwahid conceded human error was probably responsible for a string of transport disasters in recent days, including the capsize of a ferry north of Java with the loss of hundreds of lives, but cautioned against laying all the blame on the minister.
"It's not entirely his fault," Mr Nurwahid said, as he called for a thorough investigation into the transport sector. Deregulation of the Indonesian airline industry in 1999 produced a host of low-cost, low-quality carriers, notorious for their poor service and safety and more akin to long-haul bus travel than normal airlines.
But aeronautics professor Djoko Sardjadi of the Bandung Institute of Technology said the excessive age of most of Indonesia's fleet of Boeing 737s - many between 20 and 25 years old - should not be a problem "so long as we understand that the planes are old and they are not forced beyond their operating limits".
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