MAGETAN, Indonesia: An Indonesian military transport plane carrying 110 passengers and crew crashed and burst into flames in East Java yesterday, killing at least 98 people on board and on the ground, officials said.
The C-130 Hercules aircraft plowed into several houses on the ground, scattering debris and sending flames and smoke into the air, in the latest of a series of air disasters in a country with a poor air safety record.
Air force spokesman Bambang Soelistyo said that 98 people had been killed, including two on the ground, while there were 15 survivors. Survivors said they heard at least two loud explosions and felt the C-130 Hercules wobbling from left to right as it careened to the ground. The transporter slammed into a row of houses and then skidded into a rice paddy, its fuselage completely shattered.
“People were screaming as the plane was going down. We were being thrown around all over the place,” Pvt. Saputra told Internet news portal Detik.com. “Then it just blew up and I found myself lying in a field, 20 meters from the wreckage. I couldn’t stand up and some villagers came to help me.”
“Fire was rising up to the sky. I just submitted myself to God,” said Saputra, who suffered head and arm injuries.
“About 15 meters of the tail is still intact, but the body to the front is broken and burned,” said Suwardi, a local official in Magetan, who said the crash took place at about 6:30 a.m.
Some relatives of the victims were sobbing and praying at the air force hospital in Madiun, where there were around 18 bodies.
Agus Yulianto, an eyewitness, told the Kompas newspaper website (www.kompas.com) the plane appeared to tilt in the air and objects rained down from the aircraft before it crashed.
“Some things were falling, like bolts and axle nuts from the plane. The plane kept nosediving and finally crashed on two houses,” said Yulianto.
Indonesia has been hit by a string of airline crashes, both commercial and military, putting it under international pressure to improve maintenance and safety regulations. But the air force fleet, long underfunded and handicapped by a recently lifted US ban on weapons sales, has been especially hard hit. Just last week another military transporter lost its landing gear and slammed into a house, injuring four people, and 24 were killed when a Fokker 27 crashed into an airport hangar last month during a training mission.
Yesterday, black smoke billowed in the air as soldiers carried the dead and injured through brilliant green paddies to waiting ambulances. Military spokesman Sagom Tamboen said the transport plane, built in 1980, was on a routine flight from the capital, Jakarta, and went down before it could reach its destination — an air force base in East Java province.
It was not clear what caused the crash, but President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general, promised that a thorough investigation would be carried out.
“I heard at least two big explosions and saw flashes of fire inside the plane,” said Lamidi, a 41-year-old farmer who was working in a nearby rice field. It hit a tree and “the wing snapped off.”
The air force has operated C-130s — the backbone of its transport wing — since the early 1960s, when it received a batch of 10 from the United States in exchange for the release of a CIA bomber pilot shot down in 1958 while supporting an anti-government mutiny.
About 40 more were delivered over the next 20 years, many secondhand and provided by Washington before the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on military deliveries. The air force complained that many of the planes quickly became unserviceable because of the lack of spare parts.
Though the embargo was lifted several years ago, the airworthiness of many remained in question.
There also have been a series of commercial airline crashes in recent years, which killed more than 120 people.
