Agencies
GUWAHATI, OCTOBER 30
Exactly 70 years after the Second World War got over, a five-member team of researchers is currently in a village in Sivasagar in upper Assam, looking for remnants of an aircraft – a B-29 Superfortress – that had crashed there way back on June 26, 1944.
The aircraft, which was returning from a mission in Burma (now Myanmar) to its base in Dimapur, crashed at village No 1 Kothiakhunda under present-day Sapekhati police station in Sivasagar with eleven persons on board.
The team headed by Ken Tilley of the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC), which arrived on Monday, will continue their search for remnants of the aircraft till November 5.
The B-29 Superfortress was a four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber designed by Boeing that was flown primarily by the US towards the end of World War II. An advanced bomber of its time, it was one of the largest aircrafts to have been used in World War II and had features such as a pressurised cabin, an electronic fire-control system, and remote-controlled machine-gun turrets. The atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also carried out by B-29 aircrafts.
