Nagpur (Maharashtra) [India], January 13 (ANI): Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari, the Chief of Indian Air Force thanked the Ministry of Oceans and Earth Sciences for ending the long mystery behind the accident of Indian Air Force An-32 aircraft that went missing over the Bay of Bengal in 2016.

He also said that India has finally got the technology to go dep sea and locate debris in the sea bed.

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"It took so long, but finally we got the technology to go deep sea and locate such things in the sea bed...We are quite grateful to the Ministry of Oceans and Earth Sciences for having facilitated this and to be able to discover this wreckage. It brings closure to this long-pending sad accident," he told ANI.

The National Institute of Ocean Technology managed to locate the wreckage of a transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF) that went missing seven years ago on July 22, 2016, with 29 people on board.

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The wreckage of an An-32 aircraft was located at a depth of around 3.4 km in the Bay of Bengal with the help of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with deep-sea exploration capability.

"The search images were scrutinised and found to conform to 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 (K-2743)," the Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

However, the large-scale search-and-rescue operations involving aircraft and ships could not locate any missing personnel or the wreckage of the plane since it went missing.

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, the Ministry stated.

This search was conducted at a depth of 3,400 metres using multiple payloads, including multi-beam SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging), synthetic aperture SONAR and high-resolution photography.

"Analysis of search images had indicated the presence of debris from crashed aircraft on the sea bed approximately 140 nautical miles (3.10 km) from the Chennai coast," it added. (ANI)

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