Hyderabad, Sep 11 (Inditop.com) A team of the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), probing the Sep 2 helicopter crash that killed Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and four others Friday quizzed officials at the Begumpet Airport here. It is one of the four probes being conducted into the horrible accident.
The team met airport officials including those responsible for the maintenance of the chopper and its inspection before flying and weather officials to find out if they had carried out their assigned duties.
The DGCA officials also questioned air traffic control staff to ascertain what happened before the chopper crashed in bad weather on a hillock in the dense Nallamalla forests in Kurnool district.
They also met officials of Andhra Pradesh Aviation Corporation Ltd (APACL), which is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of government helicopters.
The helicopter carrying the chief minister, his special secretary, chief security officer and two pilots had taken off from the old airport at Begumpet for Chittoor district, where the chief minister was scheduled to launch a mass contact programme.
The bodies of all five victims and the chopper’s wreckage were found Sep 3, a day after the chopper went missing.
The DGCA team arrived here from Kurnool, where it held a meeting with police and civil officials and also gathered clues at the crash site in the past two days.
The four-member team headed by R.K. Tyagi, chairman and managing director of Pawan Hans, spent several hours on the crash site, meticulously examining every piece of debris. It mapped the entire crash site, the path in which the debris was scattered, location of the five bodies, the place where the engine was found and the trees that were first hit by the helicopter.
After meeting officials here, the team left for New Delhi. It plans to visit the crash site after two weeks and conduct further probe. The panel plans to submit its probe report to the government in two months. The DGCA has already recovered the black box or cockpit voice recorder and is trying to decode it.
Meanwhile, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has launched a probe into the helicopter crash. Headed by Deputy Inspector General V.V. Lakshmi Narayana, the CBI’s multi-disciplinary team involving officials from the Indian Air Force and DGCA, will look into the airworthiness and maintenance of the Bell 430 helicopter.
State government officials said the CBI would probe the crash from all angles, including possible sabotage. It will try to find out if the signals of the helicopter were tracked by anyone who knew of the schedule in advance.
The investigation team will also go into the diversion of the helicopter from its regular flight path and the response of the air traffic control in Chennai to distress calls from the helicopter.
The CBI probe is independent of the parallel investigation by the Crime Investigation Department (CID) of state police.
The state government has also constituted a two-member expert committee to conduct a probe. All four investigations will run simultaneously.
