A light aircraft has crashed in eastern Indonesia, killing its American pilot and a passenger.
Transportation Ministry spokesman Bambang Ervan said the U.S.-made Kodiak plane belongs to a private religious foundation, Advent, and was carrying seven people when it crashed while taking off from an airstrip in Papua province.
He says the five surviving passengers were taken to a nearby hospital.
No cause of the crash was immediately given.
Indonesia, a sprawling archipelagic nation of 240 million, has been plagued by transportation accidents in recent years.
Overcrowding, ageing infrastructure and poor safety standards are often to blame.
Air flight is the main transportation in Papua, the second biggest of Indonesia’s more than 17,000 islands.
