5 SEPTEMBER 2016

Ø  Later this week a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) with a robotic arm will descend to a depth of 3.5 km to scan the bed of the Bay of Bengal for suspected debris of the Indian Air Force’s An-32 transport plane which went missing on July 22. The An-32 took off on a routine weekly courier flight from Chennai to Port Blair at 8.30 a.m. with six crew and 23 personnel but never reached the destination. Massive search efforts have so far yielded no trace of the aircraft and the search gradually moved underwater to scan the seabed. Two research vessels, Oceanographic vessel Samudra Ratnakar of the Geological Survey of India and Sagar Nidhi of the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), are leading the underwater search.