Army helicopter crash kills co-pilot in Kashmir; pilot critical

The Army said in a statement that the Cheetah helicopter crashed in the Baraub area of Gurez in Bandipora district in the afternoon “while on a routine mission to evacuate an ailing soldier from a forward post”. The helicopter, the Army said, had lost contact with the forward post at Gujran.

A search operation on foot was immediately launched by the Army alongside search-and-rescue helicopters which were pressed into service, and the “wreckage of the crashed helicopter was found in the snowbound Gujran Nallah area of north Kashmir’s Bandipora”.

The pilot and the co-pilot of the helicopter were grievously injured and immediately evacuated to the Command Hospital at Udhampur, the Army said. “Maj Sankalp Yadav, 29 years old, the co-pilot succumbed to his injuries at 92 Base Hospital,” said the statement. The injured pilot, a lieutenant colonel, is critical but stable and is in the same hospital’s intensive care unit, the statement added. Yadav, a resident of Jaipur, was commissioned in 2015. He is survived by his father.

“Events leading to the crash of the helicopter are being ascertained,” the statement further said. A court of inquiry will ascertain the facts of the accident and what caused it.

Army sources said the helicopter had taken off from Sharifabad and was going towards Dawar when it lost contact. It was headed for the evacuation of a Border Security Force soldier and Army soldier.

Since March 2017, 15 helicopters of the Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Army have crashed, claiming more than 30 personnel’s lives. In one of the worst helicopter crashes in recent times, the country’s first chief of defence staff, General Bipin Rawat, was killed along with his wife and 12 Army and IAF personnel when a Mi-17 V5 helicopter crashed near Coonoor in Tamil Nadu in December last year.

According to information shared by Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt with the Lok Sabha in December, the crashes since 2017 involved four Cheetah helicopters—two each for the Army and the IAF; four Dhruv advanced light helicopters—three of the Army and one of the IAF; four Mi17 helicopters of the IAF, including the one carrying Rawat; two ALH WSI Rudra helicopters of the Army; and one Chetak helicopter of the Indian Navy.