Edited by Deepali Verma
The debris of the Indian Air Force’s An-32 aircraft which went missing over the Bay of Bengal in 2016 having 29 people onboard has been recovered after seven years, said the Union Ministry of Defence on January 12. The official statement reads that an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), deployed by the National Institute of Ocean Technology, was employed to locate the missing aircraft on the sea bed approximately 310 kilometres from the Chennai coast.
The search took place at a depth of 3,400 metres by making use of several payloads such as a multi-beam SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging), synthetic aperture SONAR and high-resolution photography, the defence ministry said.
“The search images upon scrutiny were found to be conforming with an An-32 aircraft. This discovery at the probable crash site, having no previous recorded history of any other missing aircraft report in the same area, signals at the debris as possibly belonging to the crashed IAF An-32 (K-2743),” the official statement denoted.
The IAF’s An-32 twin-engine aircraft had mysteriously disappeared from over the Bay of Bengal on July 22, 2016. The aircraft departed from the Tambaram Air Force Station in Chennai at around 8:30 am and had its arrival scheduled at Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands around midday. However, the authorities couldn’t maintain radar contact with the aircraft at around 9:12 am when the plane was some 280 kilometres east of Chennai.
The aircraft had 29 people on board including – six crew members, 11 IAF personnel, two Indian Army soldiers – one each from the Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard as well as eight defence civilians working with the Naval Armament Depot.
This search and rescue operation for the aircraft was one of bharat’s largest search operations with the Indian Army soldiers that used a submarine, surface vessel and several aircraft to locate the plane. On August 1, 2016, confirmation of the aircraft having no underwater locator beacon, the rescue mission was called off on September 15, 2016, where all the people onboard were presumed dead.
