Everyone in Indonesia has an airline story

How very true.

Today on the Indonesia Blogsite a frequently flying Jakarta-based expat writes:
Following the Garuda air crash, there will no doubt be lots of newspapers publishing air disaster statistics, but they will not cover the near misses and the shambolic state of the Indonesian air industry as a whole, writes a Jakarta-based expat.

My comment on this is that as a one-time frequent flyer in Indonesia I know most passengers consider Garuda the airline of choice. Merpati Airlines for instance, is considered a far more precarious ride.
I have one experience to share: Several years ago flying aboard a Merpati Hawker Cassa from the tiny Banda Islands to Ambon. All was fine on the one hour flight until we hit the tarmac at Ambon's Patimura Airport. Suddenly the wheels jammed and the aircraft skidded off the tarmac into the grass. It was a wild, bumpy ride which ended with the plane on its side and the right wing wedged deep into the ground. We the passengers had to squeeze out through the door which was now like an overhead hatch in a boat.

We emerged into the Ambon sunshine with the smell of fuel all around us and the sound of emergency fire engines rushing across the airfield towards our plane.

Clock one up to good fortune! MB

Related: How Indonesia became aviation's Wild West

Indonesian aircrash: a tragic twist of fate for Australians

Now being reported are some tragic explanations of why some of the Australian journalists and officials came to board the ill-fated Garuda 737. The following comes from the news service AFP:
Five Australians were among the 21 believed dead after the Garuda Airlines Boeing 737 crashed at Yogyakarta airport on Wednesday morning as they flew to the town ahead of visiting Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
Some were due to have been on a plane that left the previous evening, but missed that flight when Downer's visit to a school in the capital Jakarta ran over schedule.
The Australian newspaper's Jakarta correspondent Stephen Fitzpatrick has described how, in a further twist, fate decreed he would live but fellow Jakarta-based journalist, the Australian Financial Review's Morgan Mellish, would die.
Both men were booked on a Garuda flight to Yogyakarta on Tuesday evening, but realised while following Downer on the school visit that they would miss the plane.
Discovering that the next morning's doomed Garuda flight was fully booked they reluctantly took seats on an Adam Air service leaving half an hour later "despite its appalling safety record," Fitzpatrick wrote.
But later that night, Mellish was having a drink with other journalists and Australian embassy officials when he was told there was a spare ticket on the Garuda flight in the name of an embassy staffer.
Embassy spokeswoman Liz O'Neill -- who is also missing and believed dead -- offered the ticket to Mellish "and his fate was sealed," Fitzpatrick said.
"I caught the Adam Air flight, which was turned around just minutes from Yogyakarta, after the Garuda flight crashed on landing," he wrote.
The other Australians killed were federal police officers Brice Steele and Mark Scott, and embassy staffer Alison Sudrajat.
Five other Australians, including Sydney Morning Herald foreign affairs correspondent Cynthia Banham, were injured in the crash.
Downer was to have travelled to Yogyakarta on his own official plane.