The search area is focused about 200 nm off of Chennai.
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India’s defense minister was overseeing an aerial search of the Bay of Bengal on Saturday for an air force transport plane that disappeared with 29 people aboard. Nine of the men onboard are from Visakhapatnam.
A major search and rescue operation has been launched by the Indian Navy and IAF in the Bay of Bengal.
The aircraft took off from Tambaram Air Force Station in Chennai at 8.30 a.m., and was expected to land at Port Blair at 11.30 a.m., officials said. The plane went off the radar soon after take-off, sources said.
The aircraft was supposed to arrive at Port Blair at 11:30 am.
The reason for the flight’s disappearance has not been ascertained.
A large-scale search and rescue operation has been launched for the missing aircraft, the IAF said.
Ships deployed for the search include Shivalik-class stealth frigate INS Sahyadri, guided-missile destroyers INS Rajput and Ranvijay, corvettes Kamorta, Kirch, Karmuk, Kora, Kuthar, fleet tankers INS Shakti and INS Jyoti, amphibious warfare vessel INS Gharial and patrol vessel INS Sukanya, the Indian Navy said.
One Indian naval submarine was also diverted to detect, seek the transmissions of Locator Beacon of the missing aircraft, he added.
Of the 101 AN-32s in the IAF fleet, which were inducted the erstwhile Soviet Union from 1984 to 1991, the first 40 aircraft were “re-equipped” in Ukraine, while the rest 61 are progressively undergoing the same at the 1 Base Repair Depot at Kanpur. We have deployed our ships, aircraft to search for the plane. The aircraft can fly for up to four hours without refuelling.
The aircraft is reported to have had some minor problems this month. Before that in March 1986 an AN-32 of the IAF disappeared over the Indian Ocean.
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The last crash involving an AN32 was in 2009 in which the aircraft went down soon after taking off from the Machuka advanced landing ground (ALG) in Arunachal Pradesh. The skeletal remains and personal belongings of the crew members were recovered from the sea bed off the Tamil Nadu coast.
