US team to help probe missing Indonesian plane

MAKASSAR, Indonesia, Jan 6 (Reuters) US transport safety officials arrived in Indonesia's Sulawesi today to help investigate the disappearance of an airliner with 102 people aboard.

The 17-year-old Boeing 737-400, operated by Indonesian budget carrier Adam Air, went missing on Monday in bad weather.

The pilot did not issue a mayday call and there have been no emergency locator signals to help rescuers combing jungles, mountains and seas around Sulawesi to find the plane.

In what officials said was his last conversation with air traffic control in Makassar, the pilot said the flight had encountered crosswinds and needed safe coordinates. Radar continued to track the flight for some time after that.

Its last communication was a signal from its emergency locator beacon that a Singapore satellite picked up and relayed to Jakarta.

Nothing has been heard since.

The chief of the air base in Makassar, Eddy Suyanto, said the plane had changed its path twice after encountering bad weather.

The US team will work with Indonesia's transport safety commission to investigate various aspects of the apparent crash, including engineering, operations and weather, Setyo Rahardjo, head of the transport safety commission, told Reuters.

''Even if it takes a month we have to keep looking because we have to find this plane. This has become a national issue,'' Vice President Jusuf Kalla told rescuers in Makassar, Sulawesi's largest city, from where search efforts are being coordinated.

''It cannot just disappear like that. If it is in the sea, it will be in the sea. We have to work efficiently.'' The plane left Surabaya on Indonesia's main island of Java on Monday for Manado, provincial capital of North Sulawesi. Among the 96 passengers and six crew were a father and his two daughters from Bend, Oregon.

Nearly a week after the plane went missing, anxious relatives still crowded outside the Adam Air office at the Makassar airport waiting for news about the search.

''I am very sad as we have yet to get any news about the fate of the aircraft,'' Ati told Reuters as she prayed for her sister and brother-in-law who flew in the missing plane.

EXPANDEDED SEARCH The six-member US team consists of officials from the National Transportation Safety Board, the US Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing Co and General Electric.

''So far, the search for the plane has not yielded any clues,'' Rahardjo said.

The search had initially concentrated in areas of western Sulawesi, where the last emergency signal was received, but was expanded to the north and east yesterday.

At least four Indonesian military planes, a Singapore air force Fokker-50 and a helicopter have been looking for the missing airliner along with army and police ground teams and civilian and navy ships.

The plane disappeared less than three days after a ferry capsized and sank off Indonesia's main island of Java.

A rescue official said about 230 people who were on the ferry had been rescued, but about 400 were unaccounted for.

''Based on witnesses who survived, there were many people who could not get out from the ship because of the small door. So many were trapped in the ship when it sank,'' said Anggit Mulyo Satoto, the official at the search and rescue post in Semarang.

REUTERS AB VV1618