Jamshedpur: The Indian Navy team resumed the search operation on Friday for the missing training aircraft after it took off from Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, an official said. He said the search operation was suspended at 6 pm on Thursday due to bad weather.
The bodies of the trainee pilot and his instructor were found in Chandil dam on Thursday. The official said, “On the request of the Seraikela-Kharsawan district administration, a 19-member team of the Indian Navy from Visakhapatnam has resumed the search operation to locate the missing trainer aircraft. Due to bad weather, we had to stop the search operation at 6 pm on Thursday.” This is a two-seater ‘Cessna-152’ aircraft. It is a training aircraft of a private aviation company.
The post-mortem of the bodies of trainee pilot Shubhrodeep Dutta and pilot-in-command Captain Jeet Satru Anand will be conducted at Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Hospital, Jamshedpur, the official said. Dutta was a resident of Adityapur.
The plane went missing after taking off from Sonari airport on Tuesday, following which a search operation was launched in the surrounding areas, including the dam’s reservoir. Villagers claimed that the plane crashed into the reservoir.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has started investigating the incident along with the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), Directorate of Flying Training (DFT) and Directorate of Airworthiness (DAW), another official said.
Alchemist Aviation, the company that owns and operates the aircraft registered as VT-TAJ, said in a statement that it was too early to comment on the cause of the accident. It said, “The aircraft had 80 liters of fuel and was capable of flying for four and a half hours and the flight time was scheduled for one hour.”
The statement said that the aircraft lost contact with the Jamshedpur Airport Control Room (ATC) at around 11.10 am on Tuesday. According to the statement, the aircraft was in airworthy condition with an airworthiness certificate issued by the DGCA and was fitted with an engine manufactured by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).
The company said the search operation was initially carried out in collaboration with local authorities and then with the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). The Indian Navy was then called in for help and deployed a Sonic Navigation and Ranging (SONAR) device that helps in pinpointing the exact location of the incident.