: There is more agony in store for family members of the missing 29 personnel aboard the Indian Air Force (IAF) AN-32 plane that went missing on the weekly flight from Chennai to Port Blair, with the National Institute of Ocean Technology’s special submersible Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) giving up its search.
After a month and a half of scouring through the Bay of Bengal sea bed for the plausible remains of the IAF plane for up to a depth of up to 3,300 metres, about 116 nautical miles off the Chennai coast, the ROV drew a blank. “We have searched in about four locations and could not find anything. For the time being we have suspended the operations and the ship has returned,” said NIOT Director S.S.C. Shenoi.
The AN-32 went missing on July 22 and several ships and planes from the armed forces were pressed into service for the search, which has been elusive so far. The NIOT’s ROV got into the act last month and it was armed with a camera eye which can scan for 10 metres wide and reach up to depths of 6,000 metres.
Starting problem
Initially, the ROV had a starting problem as it too got affected by last year’s Chennai floods and later, expert teams had identified 70 probable spots to search. It was later narrowed down to 22 spots and then pinpointed to seven precise spots where the aircraft might have crashed after checking on the extensive data obtained after mapping of the sea floor of up to one lakh square kilometres, explained Dr. Shenoi.
Officers of the Indian Navy and the IAF were on board the ship during the search operations conducted over 60 km radius and the director himself monitored the imagery real time and “could only see a clear sea bed.”
Sea floor mapping was done with the help of multi-beam echo scanners by two research ships – Sagar Nidhi of NIOT and Samundar Ratnakar of the Geological Survey of India based on where the plane was last spotted on the radar, crash into the sea and possible breaking on hitting the water.
Since the precise spot of crash was not known it has made the search difficult, said Dr. Shenoi, who is also the Director of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) here.
ROV returns empty after searching for AN-32 plane that went missing with 29 personnel aboard
