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Journalism of Courage
It has been more than a week since an AN-32 medium-lift transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF) went missing last Monday while on a routine flight from Jorhat in Assam to Mechuka Advanced Landing Ground (ALG) in Arunachal Pradesh. Despite all-out efforts by the IAF and the Army, the search and rescue teams have not been able to make any headway in locating the aircraft or getting to know about the fate of 13 crew members and passengers onboard.
Total assets deployed include four MI-17 helicopters, three ALH (two of Army, one of IAF), 2 SU-30 MKI, One C-130 J, two Cheetah helicopters, one UAV and one P8I of the Navy.
Two factors have been hampering the efforts of the IAF to find the location of the plane which is likely to have crashed. There are thick jungles in the area which have swallowed an aircraft going back to the Second World War which crashed while undertaking sorties from West Bengal to China. Their wreckage is still being discovered in regular intervals.
The weather too has been playing truant and frequent spells of rain and thick cloud cover over the search area is also hampering the search effort.
Search and Rescue (SAR) teams have not been able to fly for as long a time in the areas which they would like to search in greater detail because of vagaries of weather. However, SAR sorties have been undertaken by C-130J aircraft and SU-30 during the night also using their radars to locate the plane. However, these efforts have not paid result until now.
The emergency beacon which is supposed to give out the location of the aircraft in the event of the crash has not worked in this instance.
There has not been any distress signal which has emanated from the AN-32 which could have helped point out the place where it may have crashed. It is being reported that the IAF was in the process of upgrading the technology of the beacons which are installed in the cargo compartment of the AN-32 but there are only 40 aircraft which have been upgraded with newer beacons.
The outdated beacon has not performed to the satisfactory level as a result of which it has been difficult to ascertain the location of the aircraft.
(The copy was filed before IAF located the wreckage of the missing An-32 in Arunachal Pradesh. Read more about the latest update here)
