Mandala meets Medan upcloseandpersonal.
Me. circa July 2004. At Soekarno-Hatta in Jakarta, waiting to board Mandala Airlines to Yogyakarta
Holy shit. Mandala crashed into a Medan(Sumatra) town just moments after take-off. This happens just nine months after the Lion Air accident in which, if I didn’t recall wrongly, the aircraft split into two and caught fire after it skidded off from the runway and into the bushes in Solo(Java).
I have every reason to be jittery. I was a happy passenger on Mandala Air last July, flying from Jakarta to Yogyakarta to visit my friend Hata, and back on Bouraq Airlines. Sure I was thrilled—I paid a pittance for the one-hour flight. At just Rp.195,000., S$40 one way (tax—and only domestic airport tax, Rp20,000, S$4), the ticket that Hata bought and paid on my behalf was a steal. On board, there was assigned seating and they even threw in a sandwich and mineral water. With close to a hundred flights a day shuttling between the two cities, there was intense competition among the various airlines (nine, ten?)—new start ups then like Adam Air, Jatayu Airlines etc—these regular airlines were beginning to look like budget airlines with their cutthroat pricing system.
My point is: the aviation record seems rather questionable. I don’t have solid evidence but I don’t have a very good feeling, especially after the two recent incidents. So never mind the low fares, I would be abstaining from Indonesia's homegrown airlines.
2 Comments:
yeah, i can't even trust garuda!
anyway, there are many instances where blogs get 'spammed' by bots...i dunno how to deal with that too...
i should boycott garuda too!
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