Chennai: “Hopes are fast fading”, said another officer, requesting anonymity as the ‘issue is sensitive’. He said while the choppy high waves made it risky to fly low to search for the aircraft debris, the thick clouds hanging low made it difficult to see from high above.
Defence minister Manohar Parrikar flew in Saturday morning along with Air chief Arup Raha on a two-hour trip that included a 30-minute briefing by senior IAF and naval officers followed by an aerial ‘survey’ over the ‘suspect’ area in the Bay, around where K2743 had gone off the radar at 9.16 am on Friday — the plane had taken off at 8.40 am from the Tambaram IAF base for the 1,400 km flight and lost radio contact 16 minutes later.
After the briefing on the progress, or the lack of it, in the search by as many as 18 navy and coast guard ships, including a submarine, and eight aircraft like P81, C130 and Dorniers, Minister Parrikar told the officers to ‘leave no stone unturned’ and press all the best services into operation for locating the plane. More resources could be diverted if need be, he said, and wanted the distressed families to be kept in the loop.
But then, Parrikar’s mission appeared to be more of a tokenism as he did not even know where he was heading for — he tweeted, ‘reached Tambaram’ whereas his special aircraft took him to the naval ‘INS Rajali’ near Arakkonam about 120 km away and he took off a couple of hours later from there itself, while the reporters and TV cameras waited outside the Tambaram base gates hoping to get the Raksha Mantri’s sound bytes. Those words of some reassurance from the Minister, made after the aerial survey, might have helped lift the morale of the families of the missing plane people.
The 29 people on board the missing plane included six crew members, two of them pilots and one navigator. Besides, there were 11 personnel from the IAF, including a lady officer, two from the Army, one from the Coast Guard and nine from the navy which included some from its armament depot. Mr Parrikar told the officers to use “the maximum resources” and leave nothing to chance in continuing the search.
