New Delhi, October 30: The Civil Aviation Ministry said on Friday that a team from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has been dispatched to Dehradun to conduct the preliminary and regulatory assessment into the helicopter crash near Chai village, close to Joshimath, which killed all six people on board, including the pilot.

Source: IANS

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) will also probe the accident, and its team has already left for the crash site, news agency PTI reported.

Source: PTI via The Times of Bengal

According to the Civil Aviation Ministry, the helicopter operated by Transbharat Aviation Pvt Ltd, bearing registration VT-HCX (type AS350B3), got airborne from the Badrinath helipad at 1314 hrs and was en route to the Sahastradhara helipad in Dehradun with one pilot and five passengers on board. It crashed in the forest area near Chai village, and the wreckage has since been located.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has ordered a detailed investigation into the crash, directing officials to examine all aspects of the accident thoroughly and with utmost seriousness. He also expressed condolences to the bereaved families and instructed the district administration to extend every possible assistance and relief to them promptly.

The bodies of all six people, including the pilot, have been recovered from the difficult-to-access crash site by joint teams of the Uttarakhand Police, the State Disaster Response Force and the Army, and the operation to transport the bodies to a road-connected location is under way, officials said. Karnataka Chief Minister D K Shivakumar expressed grief over the deaths of the five passengers from his state and said his government was coordinating with Uttarakhand officials to bring their bodies back at the earliest.

Char Dham helicopter safety record under fresh scrutiny

The probe begins against a sobering recent record. In an accident investigation report released earlier this month, the AAIB said there were eight helicopter accidents in the Char Dham sector between 2015 and 2025, and that most of them were due to the flight crew’s non-adherence to standard operating procedures. The bureau counted nine occurrences in that period in total, including eight accidents and one serious incident, and said five of the eight accidents were fatal.

The Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority has already grounded the entire fleet of the operator, Trans Bharat Aviation, as a precautionary measure, as reported earlier. No official cause of Friday’s crash has been announced yet, and the DGCA’s preliminary assessment and the AAIB investigation are expected to examine what happened in the minutes after the helicopter took off from Badrinath.