Hyderabad, September 13: On September 2 after the Bell-430 helicopter, carrying Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy went missing, Director General of Police SSP Yadav and his team had in front of their eyes vital information by late afternoon.
Had they followed it, they could have traced the chopper by nightfall.
Sources disclosed to Express that the moment the news of the missing chopper stunned the State, a group of police officials contacted the air traffic control (ATC) at Shamshabad and took down the ill-fated helicopter’s coordinates at its last point of contact –– N (northing) – 15 degrees, 55 minutes and 31 seconds; E (easting) – 78 degrees, 41 minutes and 33 seconds.
The officers then sat down with their laptops. Going by the topography of Nallamala forests, a path between Begumpet airport and Chittoor district was drawn. Keeping in mind the last point of contact and the coordinates, another path was drawn on Google Earth.
The officers concluded that the chopper could not have gone beyond 16 km from its last point of contact.
The logic behind it is that pilots contact ATC every four minutes and the chopper travels four km per minute.
Their assumptions were as follows: The quadrant to the west was plain and inhabited. Hence, the possibility of the helicopter landing or crashing there was ruled out.
If it did so, locals would have come to know of it. Quadrant to the east and north appeared less probable since it was unlikely that the pilots could have ventured deep into interior Nallamala. Pilots Bhatia and MS Reddy were well experienced.
They had obviously not turned back either. The only probability then was that the pilots kept flying towards Chittoor. Had they weathered the rough climate, they would have contacted the ATC in Chennai after four minutes.
They did not.
Hence, an opinion formed that the radius of 16 km around the point of last contact (towards Chittoor) was the most likely area where the chopper could be found. The information was passed on to the DGP and his core team by late afternoon. Around this time, other ‘think-tanks’ in the department were ‘busy’ — some trying to locate mobile phone tower signals, others in figuring out if Maoists were behind the missing chopper.
When the police top brass was presented with the vital information, they reportedly brushed it aside saying: “These are good for kids who play computer games.” Sources said the officials had even told the top brass that if the coordinates were fed into a global positioning system (GPS) device, the missing chopper could be traced. They had even offered to search the 16 km but were denied permission till late in the night.
When the officials checked coordinates of the crash site –– N: 15 degrees, 47 minutes and 04 seconds; E 78 degrees, 42 minutes and 40 seconds –– the next day on Sept 3, they found that this was approximately the same place that they had predicted. The chopper had crashed at a distance of 15.60 km from its point of last contact.
“Had the police machinery just gone by the coordinates, used logic and Google Earth and dropped Greyhounds personnel around that radius, the bodies of Rajasekhara Reddy and others would not have rotted in the forest in heavy rain for close to 24 hours,” the sources said.
Home Minister P Sabita Indra Reddy was given a detailed presentation on this recently. The shocked Home Minister took the police officials to task not for nothing.
—Agencies