18 die, five injured in chopper crash in Arunachal Pradesh

A man gestures near the site of a helicopter crash in the Tawang district of the northeastern state of Arunanchal Pradesh yesterday

At least 18 people died and five were badly burnt yesterday when a helicopter crashed and exploded as it came into land in a mountainous region of northeast India, police said.
“The number of those killed is 18 and five people badly burnt have been taken to hospital in Tawang,” said S B Singh, inspector general of police in Arunachal Pradesh, lowering the earlier death toll of 20.
“There were 23 people including five crew members on board the helicopter,” he added.
“Sixteen bodies have already been taken out (from the wreckage), two more bodies are being taken out and five are in hospital and they are very seriously burnt,” he said.
A Toko, assistant director in Arunachal Pradesh’s civil aviation department, put the death toll from the crash near the border with China at 17.
“We can confirm that 17 people have died in the crash and there are six survivors, including both the pilots, and they have been shifted to hospital with serious injuries,” Toko said.
The Russian-designed civilian helicopter in the state’s frontier Tawang region belonged to the government-run Pawan Hans Helicopters Ltd, officer Singh said by telephone from the state capital Itanagar.
“People said it exploded in a ball of fire while coming in to land in Tawang,” Singh said, citing witnesses on the ground.
Two of the five injured survivors were crew members, he said.
There were two children on board the helicopter when it crashed. Their condition is unknown.
The Indian army, which has thousands of soldiers in Arunachal Pradesh, deployed 100 troopers for rescue and salvage operations, a senior officer said from Kolkata, the military’s eastern headquarters.
Pawan Hans Helicopters operates daily chopper services between Guwahati and Tawang and other remote locations in Arunachal Pradesh and the rest of the northeast.
The helicopter took off from Assam’s main city of Guwahati at 12.50pm and crashed around 1.57pm.
All the passengers were Indians and mostly tourists.
According to a company official, the area where the helipad is located had fine weather for operating a chopper and that this was the first incident that the company had witnessed in the region.
“We have been operating the service for around nine years now. Even yesterday the same chopper flew back and forth from here carrying passengers. We are waiting for the rescue operations to end to ascertain the cause of the crash,” an official said.
In November last year, 12 army personnel died when a Russian-made Mi-17 military helicopter crashed after take-off near Tawang, which is situated close to the heavily fortified India-China border.