SMS helped trace crash site

An SMS helped narrow down the search area to 4 square kilometres, as the Army and Air Force conducted massive land, air and satellite-backed operations in search of the missing helicopter carrying Andhra Chief Minister YSR Reddy and four others, according to reports.

An unprecedented scale of search operations was carried out, but it was only an SMS received on the cellphone of one of the passengers that helped locate the ill-fated helicopter. The SMS was received two hours after the crash.

Before that much of the efforts to trace the copter did not really materialize. Neither the thermal imaging by Sukhoi-30 aircraft nor ISRO's Dornier aircraft did prove to be of much help.