Chennai (Tamil Nadu): Aimed at finding minerals in the Bay of Bengal, a recent mission by the Chennai-based National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) ended up solving a tragic maritime mystery, thus bringing to closure the sorrow many families endured all these years.
In barely 30 hours, the NIOT mission managed to achieve something that dozens of deep sea divers, aerial teams, and other search and rescue missions had attempted for several weeks after the disappearance but could not. The wreckage of the IAF AN-32, which had gone missing seven years back, was finally found by NIOT’s OME (Ocean Mineral Explorer) 6000, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), earlier this month. The discovery signifies the technological edge India has in maritime exploration and rescue missions.
What happened in 2016?
On July 22, 2016, the ill-fated Antonov An-32, which had 29 people on board, mysteriously disappeared in the Bay of Bengal. An-32 is a turboprop twin-engine military transport and is oriented towards flying in adverse weather conditions.
The aircraft on an ‘op mission’ had taken off from the Tambaram Air Force Station in Chennai at around 8.30 am on the fateful day. It was scheduled to arrive at Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at 11:45 am.
However, the IAF officials lost contact with the aircraft at around 9.15 am, when it was approximately 280 kilometres away from Chennai. The 29 people on board included six crew members, 11 Indian Air Force personnel, two soldiers, and eight personnel attached to the Naval Armament Depot. As the news of the aircraft’s disappearance spread, the families of the victims hoped against hope that their loved ones would have survived the tragedy.
What followed was a massive search operation stretched over the next six weeks involving several ships, submarines, and aircraft to unravel what had happened to the An-32. On September 16, 2016, officials called off the search and rescue mission after they failed to locate the debris of the aircraft. The 29 people on board were presumed dead and their families were notified.
Seven years later, the NIOT’s AUV found the wreckage of the An-32 aircraft located 310 km off the Chennai coast. The defence ministry said scrutiny of the images captured by the AUV revealed they were of the ill-fated plane.
How OME 6000 found the wreckage
ETV Bharat spoke to the scientists who were part of the deep sea exploration dive and was allowed to see visuals of the OME-6000, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle that located the An32 debris. Imported from Norway, OME-6000 operates autonomously using the data which is fed before every dive. Visuals of the debris were picked up in the last of the 30-hour dive.
The AUV is 6.6 meters long and 0.875 metres wide and weighs about 2 tonnes. It has an endurance of 48 hours in a single “dive and return to station”, which turned out to be the key factor in locating the plane’s debris. According to Dr NR Ramesh, Scientist, NIOT, the premier institute has a mandate to develop technologies for the exploration and exploitation of living and non-living resources.
“As a part of developing technology for the exploration of minerals available under the ocean, the NIOT has developed an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, which is capable of going up to 6,000 metres in depth,” Ramesh added. The AUV was on its regular task in the Bay of Bengal when it stumbled upon some “man-made objects” in rectangular size.
“The UAV captured a strong reflection of some objects at 3,400 metres depth in the Bay of Bengal. Upon analysing the images of the sonar, we came to know they are metallic objects which could be the parts of the aircraft lost in 2016,” Dr Ramesh said.
The NIOT decided to explore further. “We went close to the seabed to capture photographs of the objects,” the NIOT scientist said. Confident of their discovery, NIOT sent the photographs to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Indian Air Force to corroborate the findings. “They (MOD) conf