A South African pilot and his Australian passenger were killed when their Susi Air plane crashed in eastern Indonesia, officials said Thursday, in the airline’s third fatal accident in a year.
They were the only people on board the Pilatus PC-6 aircraft, which was carrying the Australian photographer on a chartered flight, the airline’s operations director Christian Strombeck said.
“The pilot was South African and the photographer was Australian. Both were killed,” he said.
“The plane crashed Wednesday at around 5:30 p.m. local time (0930 GMT), and the bodies were found at around 1:30 a.m. Thursday,” he said.
“The Pilatus PC-6 aircraft was flying in East Kalimantan to do some aerial photography when it crashed,” Strombeck added.
The plane went down near a village in the Kutai Kartanegara district, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.
“The aircraft crashed at the edge of a ravine,” he said.
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