The Indian Air Force (IAF) transport plane’s wreckage has been found at a depth of about 3.4 km in the Bay of Bengal. This is almost seven and a half years after the plane with 29 people on board went missing.
The defense ministry said that a close study of the pictures taken by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) recently sent by the National Institute of Ocean Technology showed that the wreckage 310 km off the coast of Chennai is that of an An-32 aircraft.
“The search images were looked at closely and were found to match an An-32 aircraft.” The ministry said in a statement that the debris may have come from the crashed IAF An-32 because it was found at the likely crash site and there were no other reports of missing airplanes in the same area.
The Indian Air Force has lost an An-32 plane with the registration number K-2743 while on a flight over the Bay of Bengal on July 22, 2016.
There were 29 people on board the airplane.
Large-scale search-and-rescue efforts involving ships and planes failed to find any missing people or the plane’s wreckage after it went missing.
The National Institute of Ocean Technology, which is part of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, recently sent out an AUV that can explore deep waters to the last known site of the missing An-32 plane.
The defense ministry said, “This search was conducted at a depth of 3,400 meters using multiple payloads, such as a multi-beam SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging), a synthetic aperture SONAR, and high-resolution photography.”
“Analysis of search images showed that there was wreckage of an airplane on the sea floor about 3.10 km (140 nautical miles) from the coast of Chennai,” it said.
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