Oil believed to be from missing plane found in strait

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Mon, 01/15/2007 4:09 PM

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta, Makassar, Manado

Search and rescue workers have found an oil spill believed to be from the missing Adam Air airliner as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono met family members of passengers on the ill-fated flight Sunday.

""Aerial surveillance found the oil spill,"" Hasanuddin Air Force Base commander Air Commodore Eddy Suyanto told the detik.com news portal.

""The spill was spotted by a Singaporean team on board a Fokker-50 patrol airplane.""

Eddy said the Singaporean crew also spotted metal debris and food trays floating on the sea.

In Manado, Yudhoyono met passengers' families at the Ritzy Hotel, while investigators are collecting and studying pieces of the missing Adam Air Boeing 737-400 with the view of eventually determining what caused the plane to crash.

""We will reconstruct the events of the crash ... once we have found significant pieces from the aircraft,"" National Transportation Safety Committee head Setio Rahardjo told The Jakarta Post on Sunday

""We need about 70 percent of the airplane for reconstruction. However, we cannot guarantee that we can determine what really happened.""

The aircraft with 96 passengers and six crew on board went missing on Jan. 1 during a flight to Manado in North Sulawesi from Surabaya, East Java.

It was not until Thursday that residents came across debris from the airplane, which included seats, a life jacket, and a part of the plane's tail.

The debris was brought to the search and rescue command post at Hasanuddin Air Force Base in Makassar for identification.

Setio said the search would concentrate on finding the plane's fuselage and black box flight information recorder.

""It's a long process ... the black box we believe will be located near the body of the airplane,"" he said.

The committee is also studying aircraft log books, passenger and cargo manifests, and communication between the plane's pilots and Makassar air traffic controllers.

Six American aviation experts -- two from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, two from Boeing, one from General Electric and one from the Federal Aviation Administration -- have arrived in South Sulawesi to assist the committee in its investigations.

Committee investigator Tumenggung is accompanying them.

""We requested the team to come here to help us identify the debris. Most of debris have been confirmed to be parts of the airplane,"" Tumenggung said.

Local residents, police officers, soldiers and National Search and Rescue Agency workers are continuing to search for aircraft parts in the Majene Sea off South Sulawesi.

The search has been hampered by bad weather and limited detection equipment.

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