Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/MANILA: Philippine authorities said Monday that they have found a plane’s wreckage near the crater of a restive volcano. However, they did not verify if the wreckage was that of a Cessna aircraft that went missing with four people on board.
According to the AP, the Civil Aviation Authority said that the Cessna 340, bound for Manila, took off from Albay province on Saturday morning with two Filipino pilots and two Australian passengers onboard.
Officials said that the Australians were working for a geothermal power company.
Albay’s Camalig town’s Mayor Carlos Baldo and other officials said that, during an aerial search, authorities spotted the suspected wreckage, including the tail, scattered about 350m near the crater on the southwestern slope of Mayon Volcano, but there was no indication of people.
Eric Apolonio, the government’s civil aviation authority spokesperson, said experts and investigators from the agency will have to examine the wreckage to determine if it had the missing Cessna plane with registry number RP-C2080 and to choose the fate of the four people on board.
The ground search hampered by rainy weather over the weekend, and dozens of search and rescue personnel may scale the 2.5km Mayon if the weather clears on Monday. The search teams would to be closely monitored by volcano experts and local officials, given the restiveness of Mayon, one of the Philippine’s 24 active volcanoes.
Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology director
“It’s a hazardous operation,” Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology director Teresito Bacolcol said that “It’s a race against time, and it’s an issue of death and life, but there’s the danger of rockfalls and volcanic lahar.”
Bacolcol said that Rescue contingents enter a permanent danger zone 6km around the volcano because “it’s an extraordinary situation,” but the search and rescue would be carried out by trained experts, who should be backed up by standby emergency contingents and made aware of the high risks involved.
The popular tourist attraction because of its near-perfect cone, Mayon last erupted in 2018, displacing tens of thousands of villagers.
It is currently under the second of five volcano alert levels, meaning volcanic earthquakes, steam and gas emissions, ground deformation, and intermittent ash and steam blasts have been sporadically detected. Awake five means a significant and deadly volcanic eruption is underway.
A single-engine Cessna plane that went missing on January 24 with six citizens on board in the Philippine province of Isabela remained missing. Officials said that the search for the plane was continuing and off, depending on the weather, in a remote mountainous hinterland in Isabela.
