Related
Stories
This image shows a Superjet on a display flight in India in March |
A Russian
Sukhoi Superjet 100 passenger plane with at least 44 people aboard has gone
missing on a demonstration flight in Indonesia, reports say.
The plane
disappeared from radar screens during a flight from Jakarta meant to last 30
minutes, a blogger with the Sukhoi delegation said.
Helicopters
were dispatched to look for the jet, thought to have been flying near a
mountain, Sergey Dolya said.
Emergency
services confirmed a Sukhoi plane was missing.
The plane,
which took off at 07:00 GMT, is believed to have had about four hours' fuel
aboard, the BBC's Karishma Vaswani reports from Jakarta.
Gagah
Prakoso, spokesman for Indonesia's national search and rescue agency, said 46
people had been aboard the plane, which vanished from radar near Bogor, a city
in West Java province.
He told BBC
News it was unclear who was on board because they were people invited by
Sukhoi, but they were "likely to be reps of Indonesian airlines".
Dolya
tweeted that there were 44 people aboard, eight of them Russians.
'Guests
aboard'
The plane
took off from east Jakarta's Halim Perdanakusuma airport, which is used for
some commercial and military flights, at 14:00 (07:00 GMT), the Indonesian
search and rescue agency spokesman said.
"At
14:50 it dropped from 10,000ft [3,000m] to 6,000ft," the agency told AFP.
Herry
Bakti, head of the transport ministry's aviation division, said the aircraft
had been on the second of two demonstration flights, and those on board were
invited guests.
The Russian
embassy in Jakarta said in a statement earlier this week that a Sukhoi Superjet
100 demonstration would take place in Jakarta on Wednesday, AFP added.
The embassy
could not be immediately reached for comment.
The
Superjet, a mid-range airliner that can carry up to 100 people, is military
plane-maker Sukhoi's first commercial aviation plane.
It was
created by a joint venture, majority-owned by Sukhoi, with Italy's Finmeccanica
and a number of other foreign and Russian firms also involved.
Gagah
Prakoso told the BBC that Sukhoi had been offering the Superjet to Indonesian
airlines.
No comments:
Post a Comment