There is no information yet about the crew members, deputy commandant Vidyasagar, co-pilot deputy commandant Subhash Suresh and navigator MK Soni however, officials said.
Thirty-three days after an Indian Coast Guard (ICG) Dornier aircraft CG - 791 ditched into the Bay of Bengal off the Chennai cost with three occupants, two pilots and one navigator on board still missing, its black box or the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) was "located and recovered" on Friday, officials confirmed.
Even as the under-carriage of the aircraft was also located, recovery of FDR has raised hope that through vital inputs retrieved from it, agencies would be able to establish the cause of the incident.
There is no information yet about the crew members, deputy commandant Vidyasagar, co-pilot deputy commandant Subhash Suresh and navigator MK Soni however, officials said.
In what has been India's longest maritime search operation so far, launched within hours after the surveillance aircraft went missing on June 8, Indian Naval Submarine Sindhudhavaj, during the search operation, picked up a "barrrage of transmissions in a depth of 996 meters on July 6" said Coast Guard officials in New Delhi.
Based on this information, a Reliance vessel MV Olympic Canyon drawn from the private firm's Kaveri gas basin was deployed to localize the search.
An uninterrupted search operation, involving multi agencies like the ICG, the Navy, the Indian Air Force, Fisheries department from Tamil Nadu and private firms, that included 693 hours of surface effort and 196 hours of air effort led to the recovery of the FDR.
The Dornier aircraft went missing on June 8, 2015 after a routine maritime surveillance sortie along the Tamil Nadu coast. The aircraft, being flown by what the ICG officials called "a highly experienced crew" had been out on a reconnaissance sortie over the Palk Strait and was supposed to come back to Chennai.
This is the second Dornier to have crashed into the sea this year. In March, two crew members of a Dornier of the navy were killed when it plunged off the Goa coast.
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