On this day in 2005, Mandala Airlines Flight 091 left Polonia International Airport at Medan at a quarter past ten in the morning, bound for Jakarta. It was a domestic hop flown many times a week, a Boeing 737-200 on a Monday morning schedule. The aircraft stalled and came down seconds after take-off, into a densely built residential area beyond the airport boundary.
Of the 117 people on board, 17 survived. Forty-nine people on the ground were killed as well, in their houses and in the streets. A hundred and forty-nine in all. The cabin crew were doing an ordinary morning's work, the ground staff had seen the flight away, and the people on those streets had no part in the timetable at all except to live beside it.
Polonia sat close in to the city, and Medan has since moved its flights out to Kualanamu. I will not draw a lesson from that today. I will only note the hour and the names of the places, and leave them be.
Harold, thank you for keeping it plain. The flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders survived, and from them investigators could reconstruct the take-off configuration second by second; it is grim work, done carefully, so that the sequence is known rather than guessed.
Thank you, Harold. Forty-nine of them were at home on an ordinary Monday, in streets that happened to lie past the fence. They are counted here too.