This story is from July 25, 2016

Aircraft search ops scuppered by 'silent' emergency beacons

Aircraft search ops scuppered by 'silent' emergency beacons
An Indian Airforce Hercules C-130J, following an aerial search and rescue sortie over the Bay of Bengal for the missing AN-32 (Antenno-32) military transport plane, approaches to land at Tambaram Airforce station in Chennai on July 24, 2016. (AFP photo)
CHENNAI: Nineteen ships, 13 helicopters, and two aircraft fitted with sophisticated equipment are sweeping more than 9,000sq km in the Bay of Bengal to locate the AN-32 transport aircraft of the IAF which went missing while flying to Port Blair, 150km from Chennai coast on Friday. Yet, they are not able to pick up signals from emergency locator transmitter (ELT) of the plane.
This was the case when a coast guard’s Dornier aircraft crashed off the Karaikal coast in June last year.
ELTs are supposed to start transmitting the plane’s location the moment it touches the water or in the event of a crash and uses Cospas-Sarsat receivers on six low-Earth polar orbiting and six geostationary satellites.
Over the years, the pings from ELTs of aircraft have helped save lives and find debris of crashed planes. But in recent times, the device has been a huge let down especially when planes have crashed over the oceans.
This has been the case with three air crashes over the sea in the past seven years – AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed over the Java Sea off Borneo, Malaysia Airlines MH370 disappeared en route to Beijing, and Air France flight crashed off the South American coast in 2009. A Dornier aircraft of the ICG had crashed over the Bay of Bengal off Karaikal coast in June last year. This has made aviation experts give a call for improving the technology.
Sources say that equipment needs to be activated manually inside the cockpit or it will activate by itself under impact. In this case, it may not get activated if the plane hits the water without sufficient force or sinks too fast.
C Uday Bhaskar, a retired commodore and security expert, said the absence of signals could be because due to damage caused to ELT in the impact. The depth of the ocean could also affect the signals. However, former pilot and air safety expert captain Mohan Ranganathan said the absence of ELT signals in the two defence plane crashes over the Bay of Bengal pointed to lack of maintenance of the equipment on board. He said, “it may be because the equipment was not properly maintained.”

“ELTs are designed to withstand all impact. It is difficult to say why it is not working. It is possible that it may have got damaged in the impact but depth and nature of the sea is also a factor to the absence of signal. IAF has updated equipment on board. There is no chance that a plane will be allowed to be airborne if it is not airworthy,” said Uday Bhaskar.
Airworthiness of the plane should not be questioned and the fact that it had some repairs done to it should not be used to draw axiomatic conclusion that it was not airworthy, he added. “No aircraft will be allowed to fly if it is not 100% air worthy. There is a detailed check almost at five levels and approvals are secured at various levels. So, earlier snags must have led to the crash is incorrect,” he added.
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