It was about 10 pm on a clear March night as a Dornier aircraft belonging to the Indian navy flew low along the Goa coast, and transmitted this message to the Air Traffic Control - "Ops Normal."
The Dornier aircraft, designed for reconnaissance and surveillance, was on a standard training sortie on the night of March 24. The three officers on board included a woman.
The Dornier was trying to gain height after flying as low as 50 feet, a crucial part of exercise.
She immediately alerted the air traffic control at the Mumbai, Mangalore and Trivandrum airports to see if they could trace the plane. Next, she called a commercial airline's plane that was heading east and asked its captain to look out for the Dornier.
"Had it not been for Lieutenant Commander Ektare the area of search would have been huge because we wouldn't know where exactly the plane stopped showing up on the radar," a senior Navy officer told NDTV.
Aircraft relay their position to Air Traffic Control at the airport nearest them at pre-determined intervals of either time or distance covered by them.
In this case, because of Lieutenant Commander Ektare, the search area was just a few square miles, making the hunt for the missing plane much simpler.
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