27 days have passed since then, as from the radar disappeared Indian military aircraft that was flying over the Bay of Bengal. Authorities don't know anything about the fate of the aircraft, say Indian officials.
Transport aircraft of the Indian air force An-32, on Board of which there were 29 people departed from the southern Indian city of Chennai at 8:30 a.m. July 22. The 42-minute flight the plane suddenly leaned to the left, lost altitude at 23 thousand feet and disappeared from radar, said the defense Minister of India Manohar Parrikar.
The missing plane took off from Chennai and was supposed to land in Port Blair. "No ... no SOS signal transmission at any frequency," he said. "He just disappeared."
A few minutes before the disappearance, the pilot said that he rejected the right to avoid heavy accumulations of clouds, said Parrikar. And then he was gone, it was only about 8-10 minutes from reaching the limits of radar coverage in the region.
Port Blair is capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Indian territory, consisting of more than 500 Islands - only three dozen of them inhabited - in the Indian ocean, about 1370 km (851 miles) East of Chennai.
Since then, search teams are combing a vast area in search of the missing plane, or a signal from the emergency beacon, all to no avail. The aircraft was equipped with two emergency beacons but - like all Indian air force An-32 - he didn't have an underwater locator systems, which makes the work of the search teams more difficult.
The air force India has about 100 An-32 aircraft - twin-engine military transport aircraft. Disappeared the An-32 flew on the same route, to Port Blair and back, three times a week for many years, and the pilot at the controls spent approximately 500 hours on the route, said Parrikar.
While the reason for the disappearance of the aircraft remains unknown, the aircraft crashed with three technical items during the few weeks preceding the accident. Technical failure most likely scenario of the accident. The representative of the Ministry of defence Nitin Wakankar said that there is no reason to suspect a terrorist act.
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