Twenty-seven days after an
Indian military jet mysteriously vanished from radar
on a routine flight over the Bay of Bengal, authorities are no wiser as to the aircraft's fate, Indian officials say.
The
Indian Air Force Antonov AN-32 transport plane carrying 29 people took
off from the southern Indian city of Chennai at 8:30 a.m. on July 22 for
a three-hour flight to Port Blair, in India's Andaman and Nicobar
Islands.
But
42 minutes after takeoff, the aircraft tilted to the left, descended
swiftly from its cruising height of 23,000 feet and vanished from radar,
Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar told the country's upper house
of parliament in Delhi last month.
The missing plane took off from Chennai and was scheduled to land at Port Blair.
"There is no SOS... no transmission on any frequency," he said.
"It just disappeared."
Minutes
before the disappearance, the pilot had said he was deviating to the
right to avoid a heavy raincloud, said Parrikar. At the time it
vanished, it was only about 8-10 minutes from reaching the limits of
radar coverage in the region.
Port
Blair is the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian
territory consisting of more than 500 islands -- only three dozen of
which are inhabited -- in the Indian Ocean, about 1,370 kilometers (851
miles) east of Chennai.
An Indian Air Force plane prepares to take off in the search for the missing AN-32.
'No clues whatsoever'
Since
then, search teams have scoured the vast search area for signs of the
missing plane, or signals from its emergency locator transmitters, to no
avail.
The plane was equipped with
two emergency locator transmitters, but -- like all the Indian Air
Force's AN-32 fleet -- it did not have an underwater locator system,
making the work of search teams more difficult, CNN affiliate News 18
reported.
Indian Air Force
spokesman Anupam Banerjee said that more than 1,000 hours had been flown
searching for the missing aircraft, while Indian Navy spokesman DK
Sharma told CNN that five ships and several Navy aircraft remained
engaged in the search.
Inspector General Rajan Bargotra of the Indian Coast Guard briefs reporters on the search efforts.
The
vessels, said Parrikar, include a survey ship using sonar to scan the
ocean floor -- four kilometers deep in places -- and a submarine.
But
searchers still had "no clues whatsoever" on the plane's whereabouts,
said Sharma. Crews have recorded dozens of sightings of debris, but
frustratingly, none that comes from the missing aircraft.
Plane had been upgraded
The plane was one of the Indian Air Force's fleet of about 100 Antonov AN-32s -- a twin-engine military transport aircraft.
The
missing AN-32 flew the same route, to Port Blair and back, three times a
week for years, and the pilot behind the controls had put in about 500
hours on the route, said Parrikar.
The
Indian Air Force has been modernizing its AN-32 fleet, and the missing
plane had undergone an overhaul to replace its equipment. But it had
flown about 270 hours since the upgrade, he said.
"It's not that something new was changed, and (the crash) happened the next day," he said.
An Indian Air Force Antonov An-32 transport plane -- the same aircraft that is missing -- at an air base in Srinagar in 2014.
While
the cause of the plane's disappearance remains unknown, the plane had
suffered three technical issues in the weeks preceding the crash, CNN
affiliate News 18 reported, making a technical failure the most likely
scenario.
Defense Ministry spokesman Nitin Wakankar said there was no reason to suspect terrorism was a cause.
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