Missing plane: What happened to the Indian military aircraft?

Indian aviation experts appear no closer to solving the mystery of a military aircraft that disappeared over the Bay of Bengal last month with 29 people on board.

What happened?

The plane vanished shortly after take-off from the southern city of Chennai on 22 July. The Russian-built Antonov AN-32 military transport plane was making a routine courier service to Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, with 23 service personnel and six crew members on board.

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Contact with air traffic control was lost just 15 minutes into the flight, with a source in the Indian Air Force (IAF) saying the plane made a sharp left turn before quickly losing altitude. "It just disappeared – no SOS, no transmission at any frequency," said defence minister Manohar Parrikar. "That is the worrying part." However, he added that there was little evidence the plane had been sabotaged.

The search operation

Officials told the BBC that the ongoing hunt for the missing aircraft is possibly "the biggest and most arduous" in India's aviation history. "It is like searching for a needle in a haystack. We are still hoping for a miracle," one source said.

Military and coast guard planes have covered 360 nautical miles in search of debris, but no wreckage has so far been located. Dozens of ships and submarines are also involved in a deep sea search, scouring 430 square kilometres of ocean. The Indian government has also been in touch with officials in the US, requesting satellite information that could be helpful in the search.

"We may never know what really happened aboard the missing aircraft," Bikram Vohra writes for the Indian First Post. He points to the unreliability of the aircraft in question, citing 77 incidents that have occurred with the AN 32 since 1986.

"In some ways these are the worst of aviation crashes because not only is life lost but no one knows why and sometimes there is no closure," he says.

Vohra adds: "Even if we find the wreckage, recovering the black boxes will be very difficult. We can second guess the combination of bad weather and structural collapse all we like but this flight has probably taken its secret with it forever."