Debris of an Indian Air Force An-32 transport aircraft which went missing over the Bay of Bengal less than eight years ago has been finally traced by National Institute of Ocean Technology’s (NIOT’s) autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) following a deep sea exploration using multiple high tech payloads.

The IAF had given up hope after carrying out the largest search and rescue mission to trace the An-32, with 29 personnel on board, that went missing on the morning of July 22, 2016, after it took off from Chennai and was bound to land at INS Utkrosh naval air station in Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Large-scale search and rescue operations by aircraft and Indian Navy ships could not locate any missing personnel or the debris of aircraft bearing registration K-2743, the Ministry of Defence said. It was reported then that the aircraft did not have any underwater locator beacons which had made it difficult for platforms like submarines deployed by the Indian Navy to pick up signals that help locate submerged objects.

NIOT deployment

The 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 in the Bay of Bengal, said the Ministry. “This search was conducted at a depth of 3,400 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 (approx. 310 Km) from the Chennai coast,” informed the MoD.

The Ministry stated that the search images were scrutinised and found to be conforming 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),” it remarked.

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