Click to play videoNew Delhi: Indian Air Force, Army and paramilitary forces resumed the search effort on Wednesday morning for missing IAF AN-32 aircraft that crashed over Arunachal Pradesh on Tuesday.
IAF began aerial reconnaissance to trace the transport aircraft while Army and paramilitary forces too have been pressed into the search operation.
There were 13 people on board including six IAF officers and seven Army personnel and all of them are feared dead.
The aircraft had taken off from Machuka in Arunachal Pradesh on a supply sortie and was on its way to Mohanbari in Assam when it went off radar due to bad weather and crashed.
The last radio contact with the missing aircraft was 35 miles from Machuka.
Top-level sources in IAF say flying crew of AN-32 was highly experienced and bad weather is suspected to be reason for the crash.
The AN-32 are Russian-made transport aircraft, which were acquired for the Indian Air Force in the 1980s and is widely considered a 'safe' aircraft.
The last crash involving an AN-32 was at Delhi in 1999.
There have been spates of crashes involving IAF's aircraft in the past few months.
In May, a MiG-27 crashed in an open field in Rajasthan's Pokharan range in which five people working in the field were injured but the pilot ejected safely.
A Sukhoi-30, IAF's frontline fighter crashed 70 km east of Jaisalmer, in April, It was the first crash involving Sukhoi-30. Pilot Wing Commander PS Nara died in crash while and co-pilot Wing Commander SV Munje was injured.
Earlier in the year a Surya Kiran plane belonging to the IAF crashed about four kms from Bidar in Karnataka and pilot RS Dhaliwal, a Vayusena medal winner was killed. An enquiry is still on to find out the cause of the crash.
In 2008, a MiG-23 fighter trainer went down shortly after take off from the Hashimara Airbase in West Bengal.
A Hawk jet trainer also crashed at Bidar in 2008 although both pilots survived. Ironically, the Hawk aircraft were acquired to reduce the IAF's accident rate.
In an unusual incident in 2007, a Jaguar exploded in mid-air over the Pokharan range in Rajasthan after what was reported as a technical fault. Pilot Flight Lieutenant Ravi Khanna was killed in the blast.
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