A search operation to retrieve the remains of six of the 13 people who died when an AN-32 military plane crashed on June 3 was hampered due to bad weather, the Indian Air Force (IAF) said yesterday.
Seven bodies were recovered on Thursday.
The IAF said that helicopters have been put on stand-by to restart the operations once the weather improves.
“At present, there are low clouds associated with rain in the area. The IAF is making all efforts to retrieve the mortal remains of the deceased air-warriors. IAF personnel are in constant contact with the families of these air-warriors and are being updated regularly. They are also being explained about the challenges about the weather,” Wing Commander Puneet Chadha said in a statement.
On Friday, the search teams recovered the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR) of the aircraft that crashed in Arunachal Pradesh.
A team of 16 mountaineers from the IAF and the Indian Army along with five civilian mountaineers are combing the site of crash 16km north of Lipo, northeast of Tato in West Siang district, at a height of 12,000ft.
IAF chief B S Dhanoa said yesterday there was need to review and ascertain the cause of the crash and ensure it did not occur again.
“We will go into the details as to what happened and how do we make sure that it does not happen again,” he said.
“You must remember that in Arunachal Pradesh the terrain is very treacherous and most of the time, it is cloudy. When you are flying in that terrain, in that cloudy weather, there have been many, many, not only Air Force, even otherwise, Pawan Hans and a lot of accidents because of controlled flight into terrain,” he said.
This handout photo released by the Indian Air Force (IAF) shows the wreckage of the AN-32 aircraft, about 16km north of Lipo in Arunachal Pradesh.
