Careful and resourceful use of cellphone data led to the search for late Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy narrowing to a patch of the Nallamala forests. Radiation and signal in cellphone on board the ill-fated chopper, recorded by mobile towers and
retrieved from a central computer, helped zero in on the crash site.
The data, along with trace of an SMS delivered at 12.06 pm on Wednesday to one of the mobiles on board, helped those monitoring the situation at the secretariat in Hyderabad to mark out a 10 sq km of the forests. The signal from cellphones was recorded by towers, which were present even in the remote area.
Along with the cellphones, the data from the pictures recorded by an Isro plane equipped with remote sensing facilities, helped the search. Also useful were the visual sightings by some villagers who saw the low flying chopper. On Thursday, commandos slithered down at the crash site and put the bodies into gunny bags which were then winched up to the IAF chopper.
Around midnight on Wednesday, while analysing data sent by Sukhoi-30, Chetak and MI-8 choppers, Group Captain Rajesh Issar of the IAF—one of the members of the crisis management team and commander of the IAF’s Helicopter Training School in Hyderabad—realised that the information gathered was inadequate to pinpoint the accident site.
Thousands of images received from nearly eight hours of sorties by choppers and the IAF’s topof-the-line Sukhoi-30 MKI had failed to give any hint of the location.
Sources in the defence ministry said members of the crisis committee, comprising state police chief and IAF experts, at this point picked up call details of mobile phones and the last towers through which these phones had received signals and the vital SMS—which is learnt to have been received on the mobile phone of YSR’s security officer John Wesley.
source:timesofindia
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