7 FEARED DEAD IN CHOPPER CRASH
A helicopter with seven people, including five ONGC employees, crashed off Mumbai’s coast. Five bodies have been recovered. The helicopter was on a normal sortie but went missing after it took off from Juhu airport at 10.20am.
MUMBAI :A Pawan Hans helicopter carrying seven people, including five senior officials of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), crashed off Mumbai’s coast on Saturday. While bodies of five people were recovered after day-long rescue operations, two people were missing at the time of filing this report.
The chopper had taken off from the Juhu airport at 10.14am and was heading towards an oil rig, NQO, at Bombay High. It crashed around 30 nautical miles off the city’s coast near Uran, when the pilots lost contact with the ONGC air traffic control (ATC) around 10.33am.
Sources involved with the rescue operations said the chopper could have exploded as they found debris scattered in the sea.
The ill-fated Dauphin SA365N3 helicopter had two senior pilots — captains Ramesh Ohatkar and VC Katoch — at the controls and the ONGC employees on board were identified as R Saravanan, PN Sreenivasan, Jose Antony, Pankaj Garg and VK Bindu Lal Babu — all deputy general managers. The bodies of Sreenivasan, Antony and Garg were identified, while officials were trying to establish the identity of the other two victims.
Earlier, after the chopper had lost contact with the ONGC ATC, the Mumbai ATC and Pawan Hans officials had alerted the Indian Coast Guard and the Navy. The Coast Guard and Navy deployed their assets for the search and rescue operations around 11.20am.
The debris of the chopper was spotted around 1.30pm and ships were moved towards the area, where five bodies were found.
The accident, according to sources, happened after the Juhu ATC handed over the helicopter flight path to the ONGC ATC located in the high seas. “The helicopter was flying at a height of 700 feet till the time it was coordinating with the Juhu ATC. At the time of the crash, it was at a height of 2,200 feet,” said a Juhu ATC official.
Officials of ONGC contacted all helipads for information on the helicopter before sending out a distress call.
The civil aviation ministry has directed the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) to conduct a detailed probe into the accident, which is the twenty-first of its kind since the inception of Pawan Hans 31 years ago.
Dharmendra Pradhan, minister of petroleum and natural gas, flew to Mumbai to oversee the search and rescue operations. Pradhan told ANI, “It is a sad and painful incident for ONGC.”