Today we hear news of yet another Adam Air mishap. This time KI 172 flying from Jakarta to Surabaya was forced to do a hard landing, resulting in a crack in the plane. This comes barely a month and a half from another tragedy involving Adam Air’s Flight KI 574 with 102 people on board.
As usual with such incidents, its headless chickens time again in Indonesia with calls to ground all of the airline’s 737 planes and the generation of lots of sound and fury signifying nothing but a Government and the Press with the attention span of a nudibranch.
Unspun‘s alter ego wrote in The Jakarta Post shortly after KI 574:
As usual, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been quick off the mark in responding to the disappearance of Adam Air flight KI-574 with 102 people on board. He has ordered the transportation minister to investigate all aspects of all airlines.
As usual, the President’s orders are unlikely to yield any lasting results. They are broad to the point of being vague and more symptomatic of a knee-jerk reaction than a carefully considered attack on the real cause of the problem….
Sadly this non-action has come to pass. It appears that there has been no thorough investigation of Adam Air, let alone the airline industry; that there has not even been a thorough safety audit beoing conducted by the government.Hence Transportation Ministry Spokesman Bambang S. Ervan’t comment to The Jakarta Post this morning that his office will examine the airworthiness of Adam Air’s Boeing 737-300 aircraft while they are grounded?
Will!!?? Does this mean the Government has not conducted any airworthiness tests of all Adam Air planes after KI 574 and an earlier flight where the pilot went severly off course? What gives? And what is the Indonesian press doing about it? How can a government sit on its ass for more than a month after a major airline disaster (as well as other train and ferry diasters this year) and not be held accountable and, if necessary, ridicule, by the Indonesian Press? The Press needs to realize that in a government prone to inertia they need to shame it into action.
Unspun 
Some of the IHT reports I link to today tell of high level shenigans in the initial start up phase of Adam Air involving govt. money ~ which was meant for public rather than private benefit.
And isn’t it sad that the ‘real’ stories are not about ‘natural’ disasters but the general malfeance behind the causes.
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did you watch the news last night? the adams have painted the airlplane to white… though they were strictly told to not to modify the plane in any kind.
Yo! Yo! (sorry, couldn’t resisit that):no did not watch the news last night. what do you mean they painted it white? Its the orange on top and white in the bottom, no?
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