As the search and rescue mission to locate the missing AN-32 plane with 29 personnel on board entered the fifth day on Tuesday, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar informed Parliament all efforts were on. However, some leads turned out to be false, he said adding “four or five blinks” were detected by satellites recently.
Giving the status of the ongoing operation in the Rajya Sabha, he said experts were now verifying if the blinks were “misleading or factual.” Asserting that the Government had spared no efforts in locating the plane, Parrikar said the Government had used satellite imagery and deployed 30 ships and submarines besides planes for the purpose.
Parrikar said it is one of the safest aircraft and there have been reports of only two accidents in the last ten years. “A lot of resources are in place. All leads till now have turned out to be bad. We are trying to concentrate on some links or sound emitted from some areas. Trying to find out, that needs to be ascertained but there were some false leads of similar type,” he said.
He also said a state of art ice-class research vessel, Sagar Nidhi, of the National Institute of Ocean Technology has been called for from Mauritius. “That will reach but any deep vessel to operate, it will need specific area. Because deep vessels which go inside cannot go and search per se unless you have some definite small area.”
Sagar Nidhi comes with Dynamic Positioning System which keeps its position stable required for oceanographic research. It has a huge deck area for deploying manned submersibles and tsunami monitoring system. The rescue operation is now spread over nearly four lakh square metres in the Indian Ocean with depth of sea more than four kms.
The Coast Guard said the assistance of Geological Survey of India was sought for deployment of their Oceanographic research vessel Samundra Ratnakar for subsurface search.