The intensive search operation carried out by multiple agencies
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Chennai: More than 200 hours or eight days since CG-791, the Dornier aircraft of Coast Guard went missing, the intensive search operation carried out by multiple agencies, including research institutes like National Institute of Ocean Technology, has drawn a blank.
The search team is currently concentrating on a stretch ranging from 30-80 nautical miles off Sirkazhi coast, Tamil Nadu police sources said adding that it was proving to be really difficult to locate the aircraft.
“Neither the sonar locator beacon of the aircraft nor the personnel locator beacon (a personnel safety device) seem to be functioning, as only intermittent and feeble signals are being emitted,” he said.
The Coast Guard are hoping that the advanced research vessel ‘Sagar Nidhi’, with four scientists of NIOT onboard, will determine the location of the aircraft, assuming it to have crashed and its wreckage lying on the sea surface. “We are hoping that a precise location will be narrowed down in the next two days,” a Coast Guard official said.
“Sagar Nidhi is currently in place and conducting its survey of the seabed with the help of hi-tech instruments. The delay to ascertain the right location till now is because of the vastness of the sea,” the institute’s director M.A. Atmanand told Deccan Chronicle over phone. Searching the seabed surface is not an easy task if assuming the aircraft crashed into the sea, police sources said.
The seabed surface ranges from 700 metres to 1 kilometre and is too deep to be negotiated even by the submarines, which can go utmost to 350 metres below, they said.
“In the event of locating the aircraft, its retrieval from such deep sea levels will be impossible,” the source said. In the Dornier (belonging to Navy) crash recorded earlier this year off the coast of Goa, the bodies of two officers were retrieved in less than four days as the sea levels were comparatively shallow.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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