Had YSR's chopper turned west, it might have survived

Had the pilot of late Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy's helicopter turned west instead straying 18 kilometres east of the flight path, the chopper might not have crashed or even if it had been encountering problems, could have been crash landed in paddy fields, a senior police official who was part of the team and has a lot of experience serving in the region said.

The crash site lies on the first high hillock on the east.

Satellite images showed that while this hillock marked the beginning of a vast, undulating and forested terrain on the east, on the western side it is full of paddy fields, plains and a lot many towns and big villages where the chopper could have somehow landed safely, even in case of an emergency.

"That is what has been intriguing me from the time we located the wreckage. The helicopter was proceeding from north to south. The crash site is 18 kilometres to the east of the flight path. One possibility is that the pilot had encountered extremely bad conditions and was planning to head back, turning east. If they had turned west, there would have been better chances of survival," the official also said.

Satellite images also show that the site of the crash was where the height of the terrain increases sharply from 400 to 500 metres. "This was the first hillock on that side of the area. They never crossed it," the officer said.

Lessons from the past were never learnt

Sources in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh say there were two similar crashes in the past two years.

In a clear sign that no lessons were learnt from the previous crashes, it turns out all crashes happened under exactly the same circumstances as now.

In July 2007, a chopper that had taken off from Bhopal to Raipur disappeared over hilly and forested terrain. It took a week for the search team to find the wreckage on the border of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Investigators who pieced together circumstantial evidence found out that the chopper was flying low due to bad weather and crashed into a tree on top of a hillock between Rajnandgaon and Balaghat.

More recently, a Bell 430 helicopter (the same as what YSR had taken) headed for Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh disappeared after it lost contact an hour after taking off from Hyderabad. In that instance, it took three months to find the wreckage of that chopper.

In all the three cases, the choppers ran into bad weather mid-flight. In all three cases, they were flying at low altitudes. In all three cases, the wreckage were found on hilltops.

"Once they encounter bad weather, they try and duck under the clouds to avoid any mishap. In most parts of Chhattisgarh (which is a highly forested and hilly terrain) and Andhra Pradesh, the hills are not even. They have tricky slopes. They keep going up and down. And the forest cover does not really give an idea for the pilots about the terrain. Till you are very close, it is all green and the contours are not easily visible," a senior Chhattisgarh police officer from the Bastar region said.

And in all three cases, the pilots' ploy of flying under the clouds proved costly. "These are extremely dangerous places to be flying at 500 metres or below. You don't know when the terrain might rise sharply. And in any case, flying low doesn't help with visibility if and when there is a heavy downpour," an Andhra police officer said.

Image: The crash site of YSR's chopper in Nallamalla forests in AP

Photograph: SnapsIndia