737 on crack

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February 23, 2007 - 12:59PM
Indonesia's government has grounded budget carrier Adam Air's six Boeing 737-300 planes for safety checks after one of its aircraft cracked during a hard landing, officials said on Thursday.

The Boeings, almost a third of the airline's fleet, will not fly until they have passed the safety inspection from the government, Adam Air safety director Hartono said.

The Indonesian government has stepped up safety investigations since an Adam Air plane carrying 102 people disappeared in January.

But the airline urged the Transport Ministry to review the decision, saying the cause of the accident was still being investigated.

"The Adam Air management is surprised by the decision and views it as harsh punishment given to a national airline," the company said in a statement.

The chief of the Indonesian transport safety committee, Setyo Rahardjo, told Reuters an investigation was still underway and he could not reveal results yet.

Qantas had considered buying a 30 per cent stake in Adam Air in a bid to tap into the fast growing Indonesian aviation market.

But following the disappearance of an Adam Air jet in January, Qantas chief financial officer Peter Gregg said Qantas had lost interest in the disaster prone carrier.

All 148 passengers on the aircraft that made a hard landing on Wednesday were safe, but the accident prompted a temporary closure of Juanda Airport in Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city and the capital of East Java province.

The body of the plane was cracked through the middle of the passenger section, leaving the tail drooping towards the ground.

On January 1 an Adam Air Boeing 737-400 disappeared from radar screens during a domestic flight from Surabaya to Manado in the north of Sulawesi island.

No bodies have been found from the plane, although some debris was recovered from the sea off South Sulawesi.

That accident sparked widespread discussion of Indonesian aviation safety standards and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono set up a commission to investigate transport safety.

Adam Air said Wednesday's incident was caused by strong wind amid heavy rain at the airport, and the plane, made in 1994, had undergone thorough checks before flying.

The incident had prompted some passengers to cancel flights with the carrier, Elshinta radio reported.

Adam Air, one of about a dozen budget airlines in the world's fourth most populous nation, operates 19 Boeing 737 jets. It serves dozens of domestic routes in Indonesia and also flies to Singapore.

Air travel in Indonesia, home to 220 million people, has grown substantially since the liberalisation of the airline industry after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.

That's crazy. I think it's time for Adam Air to throw in the towel, losing two out of 20 planes in six weeks is insane.

It's so sad, but transportation safety in places like Indonesia (and Nigeria, etc.) is still an iffy proposition, just look at what's going on with the ferries there. Some global corporations go so far as to operate their own shuttle aircraft for employees in parts of the world where the safety risk in public transport is deemed to be too great. You not only have to worry about outdated equipment and infrastructure, but lack of government safety oversight, corrupt inspectors who will take a bribe to overlook defects, poorly trained professionals etc. Anyone traveling in such parts of the world needs to seriously think about these issues and not choose travel options based solely on price or convenience considerations as we do in the USA.