File photo of a Dornier aircraft operated by the Coast Guard
A submarine has picked up feeble intermittent signals from what is likely to be from the missing Dornier aircraft off the Chidambaram coast in Tamil Nadu, where the plane is believed to have crashed. The location of the aircraft, however, has not been identified yet.
The Coast Guard aircraft that took off from Chennai on Monday evening on a routine surveillance flight was last tracked 16 kilometres east off Chidambaram coast by radar in Trichy at 9:23 pm.
On Saturday, a Navy ship INS Sandhyak, too, had picked up intermittent beacon signals from what was likely to be from the Dornier.
"A vessel belonging to the National Institute of Ocean Technology would launch its under-sea probe today," said SP Sharma, Inspector General, Coast Guard.
Search operations entered its seventh day today with at least 10 ships, two aircraft and few helicopters deployed to locate the missing aircraft.
Tests of oil slick found near the area where the aircraft was last tracked have found no aviation fuel.
Lab tests of a second oil slick in the search area failed to locate aviation fuel.
The aircraft was being flown by Deputy Commandant Vidyasagar and had on board Deputy Commandant MK Soni, the co-pilot, and Navigator Deputy Commandant Subash Suresh.