Itanagar: A transport aircraft of the IAF with 13 people on board went missing in Aruanchal Pradesh on Monday after taking off from Assam. It was flying from Jorhat to the Mechuka Advanced Landing Ground. Located in a picturesque and sparsely populated valley, Mechuka has one of the many rudimentary landing strips run by the Air Force near the Line of Actual Control with China. The terrain under the flight’s route is mountainous and heavily forested.
The landing and take-off approaches to Mechuka are extremely difficult. Coupled with erratic weather, the region is among the most inhospitable for air transport. “The aircraft may have got entangled in low clouds. Flying in these areas is fraught with a measure of uncertainty,” Air Commodore Prashant Dikshit (Retired) told NDTV. The AN-32 aircraft lost contact with ground agencies at 1 pm.
When it did not land at the scheduled time at the assigned airfield, all available resources were employed to locate the plane.
The Army, the Indo Tibetan Border Police and the Arunachal Pradesh Police were still engaged in the task when reports trickled in the evening. The An-32’s disappearance over the Northeast brings back memories of a similar disappearance in 2016, when an Indian Air Force transport plane went missing over the Bay of Bengal.
That plane was an Antonov An-32 as well. It was never found. The plane took off from Chennai at around 8am and was supposed to land at INS Utkrosh, an Indian naval air station, in Port Blair. Shortly after take-off, the aircraft lost all contact and went off radar while it was over the Bay of Bengal. The disappearance promoted the armed forces to launch what later became India’s largest search and rescue mission for a plane missing over sea.