By the time this newspaper reaches the readers, 72 hours would have been over since the AN-32 aircraft of the Indian Air Force that took off from Tambaram Air Station near Chennai on Friday went missing. Even at the time of going to Press at midnight on Sunday, there is no information about the aircraft which was on a routine flight from Chennai to Port Blair in Andaman with 29 personnel on board. Neither the Ministry of Defence nor the IAF has come out with details of the crew and the personnel on board.
“Bay of Bengal where the aircraft has gone missing is atrocious in the months of July and August thanks to the fury of the Monsoon. There is no chance of locating the debris or remains of the aircraft under the existing condition,” said Hariharan Balakrishnan, former Captain of the Indian Navy.
Captain (Retd) Balakrishnan, a veteran of many search and rescue missions in the area, said he was upset over the failure of the commander of the aircraft to issue the MayDay distress signal. “What happened to the Electronic Position Indicating Radio Beacon or EPIRBIJ
All aircraft have been incorporated with this instrument which can emit pre-fixed call signs in the eventuality of any kind of emergency,” said Captain (Retd) Balakrishnan. The EPIRB floats on water if the aircraft crashes into the sea and its signals are picked up by INMARSAT, he pointed out. Captain (Retd) Balakrishnan also said it would be difficult for the aircraft and ships to find out any oil spillage from the ill-fated plane because of the inclement weather conditions.
Experts with experience in sea rescue missions pointed out that the authorities seem to have failed to learn anything from last year’s disaster involving a Coast Guard aircraft. A Dornier aircraft with three young aviators on a routine surveillance mission along the Tamil Nadu coast went missing on June 8, 2015. It took 36 days for the Operation Talash, the rescue mission helped by ships, submarines and aircraft drawn out from Indian Navy and the Coast Guard, to retrieve the remains of the missing aircraft from the depth of the Bay of Bengal off Cuddalore coast in Tamil Nadu.
“The search team for the Dornier aircraft included Sagar Nidhi, a state-of-the-art research vessel owned by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) and Olympic Canyon, a US ship which had been hired by the Reliance Industries for their oil exploration. Though it is almost three days, the IAF or the other agencies have not approached the Chennai-based NIOT,” said an expert in rescue missions. He also pointed out the absence of a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in the event of a disaster like this in spite of previous incidents.
RS Vasan, former commander of the Indian Navy, said the depth of the sea where the aircraft is believed to have gone down is of serious concern. “The Bay of Bengal has much deeper depth than the Arabian Sea. last year, the debris of the Dornier was found at a depth of 950 metres though it was much closer to the Tamil Nadu shore. The AN-32 is believed to have fallen at a distance of 250 to 300 km off the coast and the depth could be 1,500 metres or more. The rough sea will make it difficult to locate the Flight Data Recorder or Cockpit Voice Recorder”, said Vasan.
Veteran pilots and mariners are of the view that IAF may have to rework the safety laws for all of its flights operating in the Chennai/Kolkatta to Port Blair stretch.