The remnants of an Indian Air Force (IAF) transport aircraft, which disappeared with 29 personnel on board nearly seven and a half years ago, have been discovered at a depth of approximately 3.4 km in the Bay of Bengal.
The Ministry of Defence announced that an analysis of images obtained by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) from the National Institute of Ocean Technology has confirmed that the wreckage, situated 310 km off the Chennai coast, belongs to an An-32 aircraft.
"The search images were scrutinised and found to be conforming with an An-32 aircraft. This discovery at the probable crash site, with no other recorded history of any other missing aircraft report in the same area, points to the debris as possibly belonging to the crashed IAF An-32," the ministry said in a statement.
On July 22, 2016, the IAF's An-32 aircraft, registered as K-2743, disappeared over the Bay of Bengal during a mission, carrying twenty-nine personnel. Despite extensive search-and-rescue efforts involving aircraft and ships, neither the missing personnel nor the wreckage of the plane could be located since its disappearance. The National Institute of Ocean Technology, which functions under the aegis of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, had recently deployed an AUV with deep-sea exploration capability at the last known location of the missing An-32 aircraft.
"This search was conducted at a depth of 3,400 metres using multiple payloads, including a multi-beam SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging), synthetic aperture SONAR and high-resolution photography," the defence ministry said.