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RAW aircraft goes on reconnaissance mission over Sri Lanka
CHENNAI: A day after the Sri Lankan army took over Kilinochchi, pushing the LTTE fighters to the northern jungles of Mullaittivu, India sent a select team of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) on a secret aerial surveillance mission across the Palk Straits.Sources told TOI that the aircraft belonging to the Air Research Centre (ARC), a top secret wing of RAW, took off from Chennai airport around 3am on Saturday. Sources refused to confirm if the ARC exercise was on the request of the Sri Lankan government. "The ARC aircraft, which took off from Chennai with high-tech espionage equipment, flew quite close to the Sri Lankan coast and got back to another airport without returning to Chennai," a source said. ARC, which has a fleet of Boeings and Embraers fitted with some of the best cameras for high-altitude photography, can fly well above 40,000 feet. The vision of the cameras, made on the lines of satellite cameras, can penetrate clouds and get photographs of spatial resolution of less than one metre, which means a small vehicle or even a person on the ground could be photographed from those heights. For civilian flights, there are internationally accepted preset codes. The ARC aircraft uses codes and call signs other than these and keeps changing them before every exercise. The exercises are so secretive that ARC uses its own pilots and not even those from the Indian Air Force. While it uses civilian and IAF airports across the country, there is no fixed air base for ARC, which remains more of a dynamic arrangement than an organisation. "There was little notice for Saturday's mission. The flight came from some other airfield and took off in the early hours," an airport source said. Posted by: john frum 2009-01-06 |
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