NEW DELHI: All six people aboard a Trans Bharat Aviation helicopter—including five passengers from Bengaluru and the pilot—have died after the aircraft crashed into a steep hillside near Joshimath in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district on Friday.
The helicopter (call sign VT-HCX) lost radar and transmission contact around 1:14 PM, roughly two minutes after taking off from the Badrinath civil helipad en route to Dehradun’s Sahastradhara helipad. The wreckage was located near JP Power House close to Marwari Bridge in the Joshimath valley around 2:20 PM.
Victims Identified; Search Operations Turn to Recovery
Search and rescue units located the crash site and recovered the bodies of all six victims.
The pilot was identified as Captain Himanshu, a resident of Delhi. The five male passengers, all hailing from Bengaluru, Karnataka, were identified as:
Prathapa
Arun (Inspector, Bengaluru Police Crime Branch)
Shankar Gowda
Sudheer K.
H.S. Natraja
Joint rescue teams comprising the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), Indian Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), and local police are currently navigating steep, forested terrain to retrieve the bodies from the hillside.
Adverse Weather and Operations Safety
While official investigations into the cause of the crash are underway, high-altitude regions in Uttarakhand have been experiencing severe unseasonal weather, including dense cloud cover, heavy rainfall, and recent snowfall in nearby shrines like Kedarnath.
The flight had initially been cleared following temporary clear weather windows. As a safety precaution following the fatal incident, civil aviation authorities have grounded the entire fleet of Trans Bharat Aviation pending a detailed probe.
