Crack troops fan out,hunt for missing pilot high in the Himalayas

Their mission: to ascertain the fate of Squadron Leader Dharmendra Singh Tomar,the young pilot whose MiG 29 air superiority fighter crashed into the Himalayas during a night-training mission on October 18.

Tomar’s disappearance and the crash of the fighter are a mystery given that he sent out no distress call,his aircraft was from all appearances in perfectly good shape till the end,and he seems to have failed to clear a peak by barely a few hundred feet.

It took close to 150 reconnaissance sorties,UAV missions,satellite data and ground search parties to even locate the general area of the crash above Lahaul’s Chokhang village. Search teams that include the elite of the High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS) in Gulmarg and the hardy Ladakh Scouts have been digging through snow and ice on the near vertical mountain side that the MiG 29 is believed to have crashed into. Their efforts are now concentrated on a 200 sq ft area that is under several layers of snow where the fighter impacted.

There was a glimmer of hope on Wednesday,after military officers informed the local administration that they could be zeroing in on the site of the crash. There was no sign or news of Tomar,though.

The crash site was located by aerial search and images received from the remotely piloted aircraft and other aircraft which conducted a photo reconnaissance of the area. Search teams were dropped on a narrow ledge 200 m above the crash site by a helicopter. The team spent the first night in only basic survival gear. The mountain side has a gradient of 70-80 degrees. More than 80 troops rotate between a base camp set up at 13,000 ft and the high-altitude camp at 16,000 ft for the search operations. Some 150 sorties have been flown so far. (With ENS,Shimla)