U.S. team to help probe missing Indonesian plane

MAKASSAR, Indonesia (Reuters) - U.S. transport safety officials arrived in Indonesia's Sulawesi on Saturday to help investigate an airliner that disappeared six days ago in bad weather with 102 people aboard.

The pilot of the 17-year-old Boeing 737-400 did not issue a mayday call and there have been no emergency locator signals to help rescuers combing jungles, mountains and seas around Sulawesi to find the plane operated by Indonesian budget carrier, Adam Air.

In what officials said was his last conversation with air traffic control in Makassar, the pilot said the flight had encountered crosswinds and needed safe coordinates. Radar continued to track the flight for some time after that.

Its last communication was a signal from its emergency locator beacon that a Singapore satellite picked up and relayed to Jakarta. Nothing has been heard since.

The U.S. team will work with Indonesia's transport safety commission to investigate various aspects of the apparent crash, including engineering, operations and weather, Setyo Rahardjo, head of the transport safety commission, told Reuters.

"So far, the search for the plane has not yielded any clues," he said.

The six-member team consists of officials from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing Co. and General Electric.

THREE AMERICANS

The plane left Surabaya on Indonesia's main island of Java on Monday for Manado, provincial capital of North Sulawesi. Among the 96 passengers and six crew were a father and his two daughters from Bend, Oregon.

The search had initially concentrated in areas of western Sulawesi, where the last emergency signal was received, but was expanded to the north and east on Friday.

At least four Indonesian military planes, a Singapore air force Fokker-50 and a helicopter have been looking for the missing airliner along with army and police ground teams and civilian and navy ships.

"The military Boeing and Cassa planes have resumed their search and a helicopter has flown to Palu (capital of Central Sulawesi)," Captain Ikoputra, an air force officer coordinating the search operation, told Reuters.