Debris of IAF's An-32 aircraft, which went missing over Bay of Bengal in 2016, found after over 7 years

Jan 12, 2024 - 19:24 Updated: Jan 12, 2024 - 19:30

Debris of IAF's An-32 aircraft, which went missing over Bay of Bengal in 2016, found after over 7 years

The wreckage of an Indian Air Force An-32 aircraft that disappeared over the Bay of Bengal on July 22, 2016 has been found 310 km off the coast of Chennai. The Ministry of Defense announced on Friday that the wreckage of the International Air Force An-32 was searched by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designed for deep-sea exploration. “The National Institute of Marine Technology, under the aegis of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, recently deployed an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with deep-sea exploration capabilities to the last known location of the missing An-32. .The search was conducted at a depth of 3,400 meters using multiple payloads including multibeam acoustic navigation and ranging (SONAR), synthetic aperture SONAR, and high-resolution photography,'' the Ministry of Defense said.

“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,” it further said.

“The search images were scrutinised and found to be conforming with an An-32 aircraft,” the ministry said, adding that the 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).

Story of missing IAF An-32 over Bay of Bengal

In July 2016, An-32 with 29 onboard went missing over the Bay of Bengal. That plane was never found and all in the aircraft were presumed dead in the September of the same year.

The plane took off from Chennai around 8 am on 22 July and was supposed to land at INS Utkrosh, an Indian naval air station, in Port Blair, but minutes after the takeoff, the aircraft lost all contact and disappeared off radars while it was over the Bay of Bengal.

The disappearance of the aircraft promoted the armed forces to launch what later became India’s largest search and rescue mission. At one stage, there were 28 ships and a submarine deployed in the hunt for the missing plane.

The aircraft was a “twin-engine turboprop, medium tactical transport aircraft of Russian origin with a crew of five and capacity to carry 39 paratroopers or max load of 6.7 tonnes”. It had a maximum cruise speed of 530 km/hr.

The An-32, also known as the ‘Sutlej’ in the IAF, was reportedly the workhorse of the transport fleet that travels far off bases such as Leh, to deliver much-needed supplies to the army outposts in the area.