Two cellphones rang,their towers mark out search area

After being cautious for the first couple of hours amid conflicting reports over the incident,the Centre swung into action late afternoon asking the Air Force to go all out in their search mission. Home Minister P Chidambaram had a conversation with US Ambassador Tim Roemer this evening to discuss how the US could help. The Ambassador has been in touch with the Home Minister several times through the evening. He has offered US help and assistance, said a US Embassy spokesperson.

Its learnt that talks with the US were on possible help from its satellittes to try and locate the signal of the emergency response transmitter in the Bell chopper. Its on-board transmitter sends out a signal at a known frequency of 121.5 and 243 MHz. Its by international agreement that all remote sensing satellites pick up any signal on this frequency and relay the coordinates. While ISRO satellites make rounds after some hours,India was looking to obtain US help in case one of its many sateliites picks up the signal. This transmitter is set off the moment there is an accident.

The search and rescue choppers,however,did not pick up any such signal. Sources said this could also have been because the choppers never went close enough due to inclement weather.

The IAF has already set up an operations room in Karnool,the district headquarters and an officer,Air Commodore Bharti,has been moved from Bangalore to head it and coordinate the search and rescue mission. More importantly,a Sukhoi-30 has been flown from Bareilly on what is a synthetic aperture radar mission.

Under this,it will fly over the area where the chopper went missing,particularly around the coordinates obtained from the cell phone transmitters,scan radar images with on-board high-resolution cameras that can obtain images through thick foliage and cloud cover.

This is being also done to save time because choppers cannot fly after daylight. To ensure there is no delay for technical reasons,two IL-78 aircraft have also taken off from Agra to enable mid-air refueling for the SU-30.

The IAF had pressed in two choppers from Hyderabad and two from Bangalore while three others were sourced from elsewhere. An Avro and a Dornier aircraft were also pressed into action. Defence Minister AK Antony is said to have told his officials that all assistance must be rendered to the state government. As a result,the Air Force was asked to treat it as a mission it would undertake if it it lost one of its own aircraft.

However,the two IAF choppers,which flew from Hyderabad,could not proceed beyond 40 nautical miles due to inclement weather. They sought to follow the same flight path of the CMs chopper. The same exercise will be tried again.

According to information so far,the chopper took off from Begumpet at 8-38 am with fuel for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Its last contact with Hyderabad was at 9-13 a.m. At that point,it was 79 nautical miles from Hyderabad and was to change over to Chennai ATC.

But it lost contact from both places. The captain of the flight,Group Captain S K Bhatia an IAF officer on deputation with the State government was endorsed on the Bell 430 chopper in 2007 and had flying experience of more than 5600 hours while his co-pilot M S Reddy had over 3200 hours of flying experience. In all,there were five people on board the chopper,including the CM.

The first reports of any sight of the chopper came from the Karnool district administration that local people had told authorities they saw a chopper flying at very low levels. But all efforts to establish contact with any of the occupants failed. The Andhra Pradesh government then requisitioned an unmanned aerial vehicle to survey the area. The Defence Ministry,however,conveyed that this would take several hours because most of the UAVs are deployed in the North and to shift them would take long. It was in this context that the SU-30 mission was planned.