Trigana Air Services
A man walks past the Trigana Air Services logo at the airlines office in Jakarta August 16, 2015 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. An Indonesian search and rescue plane spotted debris on Monday believed to be from a crashed aircraft with 54 people on board in Papua province, the local police chief said. The debris thought to be from the Trigana Air Service plane was sighted in the heavily-forested Bintang Mountains regency, police chief Yunus Wally told the Antara newsagency. Picture taken August 16, 2015. Reuters/Rosa Panggabean/Antara Foto

The searchers from the Indonesian search and rescue agency have spotted the debris from a plane that crashed in the mountainous area with 54 people on board on Sunday. The fragments of the Trigana Air flight TGN 267 have been found on Monday by the search plane, but the ground team has still not reached the spot yet, said Raymond Konstantin, an official of the agency.

Authorities confirmed that the villagers of Papua, an eastern province of Indonesia, saw the passenger plane crash in a mountain. The ATR42-300 turboprop aircraft carried 44 adult passengers, five kids and five crew members, all Indonesians, and had been found missing on Sunday during short domestic flight.

CNN Indonesia made a statement to the authorities. The search over densely forested area came to a halt overnight due to poor weather and shortage of light in the landscape. However, a second plane has been dispatched after the wreckage spotted on Monday in Papua, Col. I Made Susila Adyana, an official from Indonesia Air Force, confirmed to national news agency Antara.

The official also said that that the ground team from the agency has also started its journey from the town of Oksibil, which was supposed to be the destination of Trigana flight. According to the Twitter post of the rescue agency, it was on Sunday afternoon when the airline lost its contact with air traffic control. It departed from Sentani Airport in Jayapura at 2:22 p.m. and was scheduled to arrive at Oksibil at 3:16 p.m.

Julius Barata, Transportation Ministry spokesperson said that ATR 42-300 lost contact with air traffic nine minutes prior to landing. However, it was not clear whether anyone on flight was alive.

This is the third air disaster of the Southeast Asian nation in even less than eight months. AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed in the Java Sea while en route from Surabaya to Singapore in December. 162 people on board died. In June, another plane disaster struck when an Indonesian military transport plane crashed and killed at least 135 people onboard.

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