The Fokker F28 Fellowship 3000, registered PK-GFU, had been flying since April 1978. Built in the Netherlands with serial number 11131, the twin-engine jet was originally delivered to Garuda Indonesia, the nation's flag carrier, before being transferred to its subsidiary Merpati Nusantara Airlines in 1989. Merpati had been founded in 1962 specifically to serve Indonesia's remote regions -- the archipelago's 17,000 islands required an airline willing to fly routes that no commercial calculus would justify. The airline operated a mixed fleet ranging from small turboprops to jets like the F28, threading between airstrips carved out of jungle, perched on island hillsides, and laid across reclaimed coastal flats. Jefman Airport was one of these: a single 1,650-meter asphalt runway on a small island facing Sorong across a narrow channel, originally built during World War II by Japanese forces and later used as a Dutch military airfield. By 1993, the runway could accommodate the F28, but it offered little margin for error -- and no margin at all for disorientation.

The weather at Jefman was not ambiguous. Eyewitnesses described heavy rain driven by strong wind, with visibility collapsing under dense black cloud cover. A Merpati spokesperson would later characterize conditions across the Sorong area as "inclement" -- a careful understatement. The crew of Flight 724 had an alternate airport available: Biak, roughly 450 kilometers to the east, where conditions were flyable. Controllers recommended the diversion. The pilot chose to continue. What followed was a sequence familiar to accident investigators: spatial disorientation compounded by weather, leading to controlled flight into terrain. As the pilot began the descent, the aircraft drifted off the approach path, turning toward open water rather than aligning with the runway. By the time the crew recognized the error, they were too low. They initiated a climb, and the nose of the aircraft cleared the promontory ahead -- but the tail section and rear fuselage did not. The Fokker struck a small hill approximately 3,000 feet short of runway 22.

The impact tore the aircraft into three main sections. Parts of the wing detached on contact with the hill, and the fuselage began an uncontrolled rotation before plunging into the sea off the airport's shore. Most of the 41 people who died were found still strapped to their seats, some submerged, some floating to the surface in the hours that followed. Two people survived. Local fishermen reached the crash site before search-and-rescue teams, pulling a young boy and a man from the water. The man, still conscious, passed the boy to a fisherman's hands -- then collapsed and lost consciousness. He died shortly afterward. The boy survived. It was the kind of rescue that compresses an entire human story into a single gesture: a man saving a child with the last strength he had, in water he would not leave alive. The crash site's proximity to shore meant the evacuation moved quickly. Relatives were notified that evening and arrived by the following day.

Investigators from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee concluded that the pilot had unintentionally flown into high terrain -- the formal designation for what happens when a pilot loses situational awareness and descends into an obstacle. The proximate cause was spatial disorientation in instrument meteorological conditions. The contributing factor was the decision to continue an approach that air traffic control had explicitly recommended abandoning. Jefman Airport's limitations amplified the risk: the single runway sat on a small island with rising terrain on the approach path, and the airport lacked the precision instrument landing systems that larger fields relied on. In rain heavy enough to eliminate visual references, the pilot was effectively flying blind toward a runway he could not see, over terrain he could not judge. The airport continued operating for another decade before its limitations -- not just safety concerns but also overcapacity and an inability to expand on the constrained island site -- led to its closure in 2004. Sorong's air traffic moved to the new Domine Eduard Osok Airport on the mainland, built with a longer runway and modern approach aids. Jefman's runway fell silent, a relic of an era when connecting Indonesia's outermost communities meant accepting risks that would be unthinkable on the mainland.