Russian Jet Missing In Indonesia

A new Russian passenger jet carrying 46 people has gone missing on a demonstration flight in Indonesia, after taking off from Jakarta.

The Sukhoi Superjet 100 disappeared from radar screens 50 minutes into what was meant to be a brief flight.

An eyewitness reported seeing a low-flying plane flying towards a mountain but did not hear any explosion.
Aerial searches for the plane have been hampered by darkness and wet weather.
But rescuers have continued looking for the plane on the ground.

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".

Eight of those on board are Russians, including pilots and technicians, the Russian embassy in Jakarta told Reuters news agency.

'Flying low The plane took off from east Jakarta's Halim Perdanakusuma airport at 14:00 (07:00 GMT), on its second flight of the day, the Indonesian search and rescue agency spokesman said.

Indonesian officials plotted the plane's movements on a map

 

"At 14:50 it dropped from 10,000ft [3,000m] to 6,000ft," the agency told AFP. Its location was described as being near Mt Salak (7,200ft, 2,200m).

Rear Marshal Daryatmo, chief of the national search and rescue agency, said the crew had not had time to explain why they wanted to change course.
Juanda, a villager who lives near the mountain, told local TV: "I saw a big plane passing just over my house."
"It was veering a bit to one side, the engine roaring. It seemed to be heading toward Salak, but I didn't hear an explosion or anything."

Jocean Bowler, an American running an organic farm on the slopes of the mountain, which is a popular tourist destination, said: "Salak's a big mountain, I didn't hear anything."

Russian blogger Sergey Dolya, who was accompanying the Sukhoi delegation and broke news of the plane's disappearance, has been filing updates on Twitter, from the emergency operation centre in Jakarta.
"The ground [search] operation will continue all night," he wrote.

"They will try to climb to the highest point. In the morning, they will continue with five helicopters."
Sukhoi officials have been on an Asia-wide tour in recent months to show off their aircraft to airline firms.
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.

Sukhoi aimed to sell 42 of its planes to Indonesia, which has witnessed a fast-expanding aviation market to cater for a growing middle class in the world's fourth most populous nation, Reuters adds.