The turboprop, bound for Kendari, was accelerating on Thursday morning when its crew saw the van enter the runway. They aborted the take-off and brought the aircraft to a halt about 145 metres (476 feet) short of the crossing point, according to a preliminary notice from Indonesia’s transport safety bureau. The van had cleared the runway; nobody was hurt.
The incident came hours after a government merger transferred control of four regional airports, including Makassar in South Sulawesi, to the new Nusantara Airfield Directorate. The takeover was meant to cut duplicated costs, but the safety bureau says the van’s permit had not carried over to the new access system. The jet held 68 passengers and four crew. Twenty-one flights were delayed.
A permit lost in the handover
Airport operations chief Jono Suartini said the vehicle had a valid permit under the previous system, but its registration did not appear on the merged authority’s morning list. “The driver followed the route that had been authorised for months. The system treated a recognised vehicle as unknown,” he said. The bureau’s notice says controllers instructed the van to stop, but it continued across the runway before the aircraft could reach it.
A recording of air-traffic radio calls and runway-camera footage are being examined by investigators. The bureau said the plane’s crew began braking after a controller warned them of the crossing, and the aircraft stopped without leaving the paved surface. It has not said whether the warning came early enough. The van driver’s account has not been released.
The takeover combined the budgets and staff of four airport units under one national directorate. Its first-year operating budget is Rp2.4 trillion (about €133 million), and officials forecast Rp410 billion in savings over three years. Airport unions had warned that access lists and shift schedules were being transferred in stages; the transport ministry said those changes would not affect flight safety.
Ministers face a cost reckoning
Mariana Delao, a member of the parliamentary transport committee, called the incident “an avoidable failure on the first day of a takeover sold as better coordination”. She demanded the ministry suspend further transfers until airports can show that every vehicle permit, radio procedure and staff roster has been checked. The committee will question ministry officials in Jakarta next week.
The ministry said the directorate had been told to preserve the old permit list while the new system was repaired, and that airport operations were continuing under extra checks. Suartini said staff were manually verifying vehicle clearances before each runway crossing. The government has not announced whether the merger timetable will change, though two more airports are due to join the directorate this month.
The safety bureau expects to publish a fuller account after interviews with the crew, controllers and airport staff. Aviation safety researcher Marika Aas said a merger should not transfer a database without a parallel check against live operations. “A runway is the last place to discover that two agencies mean different things by an approved vehicle,” she said. For passengers at Makassar, the new authority’s first test ended with flights delayed and a basic question still unanswered: who was responsible for the van?
