Hyderabad, September 07: A two-hour window would have put Y.S. Rajashekhar Reddy in a new helicopter instead of the 10-year-old one that was apparently readied overnight, a preliminary police report has suggested.
An AugustaWestland 139 chopper, brought three months ago by the Andhra Pradesh government for Reddy’s use, landed in the same airport two hours after the chief minister lifted off.
The preliminary probe by the criminal investigation department, which is carrying out an inquiry into the crash independent of the civil aviation investigation, said that the state-run Andhra Pradesh Aviation Corporation had assured the chief minister’s office on September 1, a day before the crash, that the Augusta would be ready to Chittoor. for the flight
But when Reddy reached the airport, pilot S.K. Bhatia told him they would be taking the Bell 430, a 10-year-old chopper that had not been in use for the past four months.
The Bell 430 had already flown around 582 hours — 82 hours more than the mandatory 500 hours after which it should have been sent for overhaul. It was not clear if the Bell 430 was overhauled in the intervening four months.
Although Reddy’s security officer A.S.C. Wesley expressed concern, the chief minister brushed aside the objections to the change of plan as he was keen not to delay kicking off Racha Banda, a scheme to take the administration closer to the people.
Two hours after the chopper lifted off with Reddy, the Augusta, which had been sent for servicing, landed at Begumpet in Hyderabad.
Suspicion of haste has also arisen. The CID suspects that the old helicopter and the pilots were not fully equipped with the standard flight operations like maps of contingency flight paths. “If they had the maps, they would have known that there were convenient plain areas, just 2km from Atamakur/Rudrakonda (near the crash site), for emergency landing,” said the report.
The CID’s findings have raised several questions of official failure. The CID has sought approval for a full-scale probe. Some of the issues raised by the sleuths are technical.
CID chief A. Sivanarayana, who went to the crash site in the Nallamala forests, is said to have expressed anguish in the report over the missing emergency location transmitter (ELT), a cockpit device activated in case of a crash landing.
However, Colonel (retired) Pradeep Srivastava, a former army aviation pilot, told The Telegraph: The container with the transmitter is slightly smaller than the size of a shoebox. It is in the cockpit in a position where the pilot can quickly switch it on manually. But the ELT may get destroyed in an explosion or fire….”
CID officials said the ground engineers’ certificate of airworthiness, needed for each flight, was missing. This has raised questions if the chopper had been cleared for the trip, though the local authority had said it was “fully airworthy”.
-Agencies