Yangon: Debris of a missing Myanmar military plane carrying more than 120 people was found in the Andaman Sea late Wednesday, officials said.
The military transport plane — with 14 crew members and 106 soldiers and their relatives — was reported missing after taking off Wednesday afternoon from an air base in the southern part of the country.
For hours ships and planes were scouring the coast of southern Myanmar for the Chinese-made Y-8-200F transport plane which can carry a maximum of 200 people.
The plane, which left Myeik at 1:06 pm local time, lost contact 29 minutes after take-off, while flying at 18,000 feet (5,485 metres) over the sea, about 70 km west of the town of Dawei, the military said. It was heading north, to Myanmar’s largest city of Yangon, on a regular weekly military flight that stops at several coastal towns along the way.
“Now they have found pieces of the damaged plane in the sea 218 km away from Dawei city,” said Naing Lin Zaw, a tourism official in Myeik city, adding that the Navy was still searching the sea.
“We don’t know what exactly happened to this plane after the loss of contact,” said Kyaw Kyaw Htey, a civil aviation official at Myeik airport.
An unverified report in the Mirror claimed that 15 passengers had reportedly survived the crash.
