The debris of the Indian Air Force’s AN-32 aircraft that went missing over the Bay of Bengal in 2016 have been located after over 7 years. The Ministry of Defence on 12th January issued a statement saying that the debris were found at a depth of 3400 meters around 310 km away from the Chennai coast.
The AN-32 transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force went missing over the Bay of Bengal on 22 July 2016 with 29 people onboard. A large-scale Search and Rescue operation by aircraft and ships conducted at that time could not locate any missing personnel or aircraft debris.
The debris was located by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with deep-sea exploration capability deployed by the National Institute of Ocean Technology under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. NIOT conducted searches at the last known location of the missing aircraft using multiple payloads, which included 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 (approx. 310 Km) from the Chennai coast,” the defence ministry statement said. The ministry added that after scrutinising the images they were found to be ming with an An-32 aircraft.
“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 IAF An-32 (K-2743),” the ministry concluded.
The statement didn’t add whether any mission has been planned to try to locate and recover the black box of the aircraft, which includes the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
The IAF Antonov An-32 had taken off from the Tambaram Air Force Station in Chennai on the morning at 8 AM on 22 July 2016. The aircraft were carrying 29 people including the crew to Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The aircraft was to land at INS Utkrosh, an Indian naval air station, in Port Blair.
But shortly after take-off, when the plane was over the Bay of Bengal, all communications with the aircraft were lost and it disappeared from radar. India launched the largest search and rescue operation to locate the plane after that, but could not find it.
The incident happened just two years after the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014. The plane presumably crashed in the Indian Ocean, and could not be located even after a massive search operation by several countries including India. Years later, some parts of the aircraft washed up on the coasts of islands east of Africa.
