Sundial to mark moment of Air India flight explosion

As the morning sunshine slides across a memorial tomorrow morning in West Cork, a shadow on a sundial will mark the moment a jumbo jet was blasted out off the sky off the south-west coast.

At exactly 8.13am on June 23, 1985, Air India Flight 182 — en route from Montreal to New Delhi with a stopover in London — disappeared from radar screens at Shannon. It was the moment the lives of 329 men, women and children were lost.

With no survivors, the biggest operation in the history of the State to recover bodies got under way with the Irish Naval Service being backed by the RAF, Royal Navy, fishing trawlers, merchant ships and coastguard teams.

Cork Airport and the city’s then Regional Hospital were the nerve centres as over 1,000 relatives, mainly Canadians of Indian origin, arrived to identify the victims.

Rear Admiral Mark Mellett of the navy recalls the search which would shed light on what happened to the ill-fated jumbo jet.

“Before we could go to the scene, American and Canadian experts had to fit a side scan sonar [to the vessel] which had the capacity to pick up transmissions from the black boxes — which are actually red.

“Much of the wreckage was about 2,000 metres below the surface. The ship was towing the sonar and we had to try and map the wreckage which was scattered over several square kilometres of the seabed,” he said.

The sonar was towed out about a mile behind the ship, scanning the ocean floor and searching for an all important ‘ping’ transmission from the black box.

As the technology was so new, he said, “we were learning as we went along”.

The navy was using a navigation system called DECCA which relied solely on land-based masts to show position. Unfortunately there was very poor coverage from DECCA in the search area.

“Then we got the pings from a black box. Until recovered we didn’t really trust what we had because we had never did that before.” Fingers were crossed as another ship brought in a deep water remotely controlled vehicle which retrieved the device.

He said that when he and some of LÉ Eithne’s crew saw the bodies being unloaded from LÉ Aisling they wanted to play their part in the mission and help find the black boxes.

“There was a sense of elation when this happened,” Rear Admiral Mellett said.