Almost seven years after an Indian Air Force (IAF) An-32 transport aircraft with 29 personnel onboard went missing over the Bay of Bengal while going from Chennai to Port Blair, debris possibly of the aircraft have been located by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) on the sea bed approximately, 140 nautical miles from Chennai coast, the IAF said on Friday.
The An-32 medium transport aircraft (registration K-2743) took off on a routine weekly courier flight from Chennai to Port Blair on July 22, 2016 at 0830 hrs with six crew and 23 personnel but never reached the destination. A massive search and rescue rescue efforts by ships and aircraft over several days could not locate any missing personnel or the aircraft debris.
The National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), which functions under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, had recently deployed an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with deep sea exploration capability at the last known location of the missing An-32, the IAF said in a statement. “This search was conducted at a depth of 3400 m using multiple payloads, including a multi-beam SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging), synthetic aperture SONAR and high resolution photography. Analysis of search images had indicated the presence of debris of a crashed aircraft on the sea bed approximately, 140 nautical miles, approximately 310 Km, from the Chennai coast.”
The search images were scrutinised and found to be conforming with an An-32 aircraft, the IAF said adding that this discovery at the probable crash site, with no other recorded history of any other missing aircraft report in the same area, points to the debris as possibly belonging to the crashed An-32.
As part of starch efforts then, the IAF alone had flown over 300 sorties and more than 1000 hours over the area of interest in addition to efforts by the Navy and other agencies. An underwater search too was carried out by two research vessels, Oceanographic vessel Samundra Ratnakar of the Geological Survey of India and Sagar Nidhi of the NIOT along with a Remotely Operated Vehicle which scanned up to depths of 3.5Kms but with success.
