Aviation in Indonesia
Aviation in Indonesia serves as a critical means of connecting the thousands of islands throughout the archipelago. Indonesia is the largest archipelagic country in the world, extending from east to west and from north to south, comprising 13,466 islands, with 922 of those permanently inhabited. With an estimated population of over 255 million people — making it the world's fourth-most-populous country — and also due to the growth of the middle-class, the boom of low-cost carriers in the recent decade, and overall economic growth, many domestic travellers shifted from land and sea transport to faster and more comfortable air travel. Indonesia is widely regarded as an emerging market for air travel in the region. Between 2009 and 2014, the number of Indonesian air passengers increased from 27,421,235 to 94,504,086, an increase of over threefold.
1981 Irian Jaya earthquake
Indonesia, one of the most seismically active places in the world, hosts hundreds of islands, many with volcanoes. It is an island arc, composed by a subduction zone (in the Sunda Trench) and islands. Unlike most subduction zones, the Sunda Trench is parallel to the chain of islands to which it corresponds, creating strike-slip faulting. Indonesia itself is surrounded by multiple tectonic plates – namely the Pacific, the Southeast Asia lithospheric, and the Indo-Australian Plates – causing it to be a so-called hotspot for both seismic and volcanic activity. The epicenter was in Papua Province, in the Irian Jaya Province. The orientation and type of faulting is uncertain, due to a poorly constrained focal mechanism but is thought to have been a reverse fault.