More than seven years after an Indian Air Force aircraft, An-32 (registration K-2743), had gone missing over the Bay of Bengal on July 22, 2016 during a routine mission from Chennai to Port Blair with 29 personnel on board, debris of the same has been traced off Chennai coast.
Massive search and rescue operations carried out by aircraft and ships in the suspected missing area could neither locate the aircraft debris nor any missing personnel and the efforts had to be given up.
Recently, the National Institute of Ocean Technology had deployed an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with deep sea exploration capability at the last known location of the missing An-32 at a depth of 3400 metres and found debris of a crashed aircraft on the sea bed approximately 140 nautical miles from the Chennai coast.
The images were scrutinised and found to be conforming with an An-32 aircraft, a release stated. 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 search was conducted using multiple payloads, including a multi-beam SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging), synthetic aperture SONAR and high-resolution photography.
The An-32 medium transport aircraft took off on a routine weekly courier flight from Chennai to Port Blair with six crew and 23 personnel but never reached the destination. The fate of the aircraft and the missing personnel remained a mystery all these years.