Indonesia Plane Crash: All 54 Aboard Trigana Aircraft Dead; Officials Recover 53 Bodies, Black Box

Update as of 1:23 a.m. EDT: Officials have recovered the black box of the Trigana Air Service plane that crashed in a remote part of eastern Indonesia Sunday, killing all 54 people on board, the Associated Press reported. Officials have also recovered 53 bodies from the crash site, according to reports.

Update as of 12:20 a.m. EDT: Rescuers have found the bodies of all 54 people traveling aboard an Indonesian plane that crashed Sunday in a remote and mountainous region in the country's east, according to reports citing officials.

Update as of 11:50 p.m. EDT: Thirty-eight bodies have so far been recovered from the crash site of an Indonesian plane that went down Sunday with 54 people on board, authorities said Tuesday.

"The plane was totally destroyed and all the bodies were burned and difficult to identify," Henry Bambang Soelistyo, the chief of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, told the Associated Press. "There is no chance anyone survived."

Original story:

The Trigana Air Service flight that went missing Sunday while flying over the mountains of eastern Indonesia was found "destroyed" Monday night, according to Agence France Presse. There were 54 people on board the plane.

In addition to the passengers on Flight TGN267, which was flying from Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, to Oksibil, there was nearly half a million dollars in cash on board, and those funds were going to be distributed to poor families in remote areas of the country.

There were four postal workers escorting the cash, which was distributed into four different bags. "They were carrying those bags [of cash] to be handed out to poor people in Oksibil through a post office there," said Franciscus Haryono, the head of the post office of Jayapura.

The wreckage was found fairly quickly by Indonesian search and rescue crews, but it took some time before the team was able to reach the site. The crews detected what appeared to be the plane's black box early on in the search.

"Smoke was still billowing from the wreckage when it was spotted by a plane search," Soelistyo, an official leading the rescue operation from Sentani Airport in Jayapura, reportedly said, also indicating that bad weather was getting in the way of the rescue operations and their attempt to get to the wreckage site.

All 54 of the people on board the plane, including 49 passengers and five crew members, were suspected to be dead.

Indonesia airlines, no stranger to airline tragedies, has been prevented in the past from flying in Europe because of its poor safety standards. The airline that crashed on Sunday, Trigana Air Service, is still banned from flying in Europe.