Saturday, July 4, 2015
On Tuesday, an Indonesian Air Force C-130 Hercules crashed in the city of Medan, Indonesia. All 122 people on board were killed as well as people on the ground in the city in North Sumatra, according to North Sumatra police Major A. Tarigan. Officials said the plane exploded on impact into a big fireball.
The military said the plane took off at 12:08 pm local time (0508 UTC) and crashed five kilometers away a couple of minutes later. According to Agus Supriatna, chief of the Air Force, the pilot reported technical problems and requested return to base. The aircraft was en route from Soewondo Air Force Base to Natuna.
The air force first said there were twelve crew members on board, but the total number of reported fatalities continued to change with later reports. Police found even more dead bodies from the crash on the ground, raising the reported death toll as high as 142 people. Some bodies have been identified by blood sampling, an official told newspaper Jakarta Globe.
There were some allegations that passengers on the aircraft were not limited to military families. The military is not allowed to fly civilian passengers, according to the air force chief, unless they are related to military personnel, or under some special circumstances. The chief is looking into these allegations to see if there were paying passengers.
An AirAsia jet crashed in the Java Sea last December, killing everyone aboard.
The cause of this C-130 crash has yet to be determined.