The C-130H Hercules that went down near Wamena had been in Indonesian service for only nine months. It had been delivered in March 2016 from Australia - the first of five ex-Royal Australian Air Force Hercules that Indonesia had purchased as part of a planned fleet expansion that would eventually bring up to sixteen more aircraft into service. The airframe had logged about 9,000 flight hours and was newly inducted into the TNI-AU fleet. Indonesian Air Force Vice Chief Hadiyan Sumintaatmadja would later emphasize that the aircraft was airworthy and had received routine 50-hour maintenance checks. Whatever caused the crash, he said, was not a mechanical failure.

Wamena sits at about 5,400 feet in the Baliem Valley, surrounded by high country. Its main runway, 15/33, runs roughly between Mount Lisuwa to the north and other peaks to the south. Morning weather in the Baliem is notoriously volatile - the valley can fill with cold fog that drifts down from the surrounding ridges and sits until the sun has climbed well above the horizon. When Wamena Tower suggested that the inbound Hercules switch from Runway 15 to Runway 33 because of poor visibility on the original approach, they were giving the crew what should have been a safer option. The change meant approaching the airfield from a different direction, over different terrain. But fog was not limited to one side. Mount Lisuwa stood near the new approach course, and the crew, hand-flying in the cloud, struck it.

All thirteen people aboard died on impact. The wreckage came to rest burned, the tail section detached from the main fuselage. A crisis center was established at Sentani Airport, and thirty Air Force personnel were deployed to the site; because the wreckage lay near the approach end of the runway, recovery was not as logistically brutal as some of Papua's more remote crashes, but the work of identifying the dead in burned and fragmented condition fell to three Disaster Victim Identification teams. By noon on 18 December, ten of the thirteen victims had been identified. The bodies were carried down from the site, transported to the nearest airport, and flown to Malang in East Java for a military repatriation ceremony. Major Kawer, the pilot in command, was among them.

Indonesian public reaction was immediate. The C-130 fleet of the TNI-AU had suffered a series of crashes in the preceding years, most notably the 2015 Hercules crash in Medan that killed 139 people. Many Indonesians demanded a complete grounding of the Hercules fleet; some questioned why an air force this large was still operating transport aircraft that dated, in some cases, from the 1960s. The commander of the Indonesian Armed Forces, Gatot Nurmantyo, rejected the grounding calls on practical grounds - only the Hercules, he said, had the range and payload to reach every island in the archipelago. President Joko Widodo ordered a comprehensive review of maintenance practices across the armed forces. Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu was called before the People's Representative Council to answer for the accident. The Air Force announced it would re-engine its entire Hercules fleet.

Mount Lisuwa, the peak that stopped Flight 9760D at Wamena, is one of the ridges that ring the Baliem Valley - the same valley that Australian patrol officer Mick Leahy first flew over in 1938, looking down in astonishment at a civilization of 50,000 Dani farmers no European had ever seen. In the decades since, Wamena has become the primary airhead for highland Papua. Its weather has also become infamous. Pilots who fly the Baliem call the early morning approach the most demanding routine operation in Indonesian civil aviation. Mount Lisuwa is not marked on any passenger brochure. It does not rank on any list of Indonesia's greatest peaks. But for the families of the thirteen crew and passengers aboard a Hercules on 18 December 2016, it is a name that will not be forgotten.