The government late on Saturday evening alerted the department of space and the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) for help in locating the whereabouts of the missing helicopter carrying Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Dorjee Khandu and four others. Union home secretary G.K. Pillai said in New Delhi that Indian satellites
have made two passes over the probable area from where the Pawan Hans helicopter went missing 20 minutes after takeoff from Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh but has not picked up any signals. He said the Pawan Hans helicopter carried a location transponder that can communicate at 406 MHz frequency in the event of any emergency or it could also be manually operated.
With the state-owned Pawan Hans copter — carrying Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Dorjee Khandu and four others — missing in Arunachal Pradesh, top civil aviation ministry sources also said there was no confirmation received about the whereabouts of the copter since authorities have not received any signals from the Emergency Locator Transmitter on board the helicopter. The civil aviation ministry has also established contact with the aviation regulator in Bhutan.
The civil aviation ministry has now undertaken a thorough review of Pawan Hans helicopter operations in the Northeast and also of s carrying VIPs. Ministry sources said an enquiry would be initiated once some confirmation is received about the whereabouts of the helicopter. The civil aviation ministry also set up a control-room at the Pawan Hans office in New Delhi where top officials were monitoring the situation. Ministry officials did not comment on whether the chopper had a ground-proximity warning system and whether the Pawan Hans Eurocopter flying the Arunachal chief minister was a single-engine copter that was not supposed to carry VIPs in the first place. Pawan Hans officials claimed the copter was of recent make and that the flight crew was adequately trained to fly the Eurocopter copter but authorities are probing whether there were records of any snags. There are fears that the copter could have crashed, nearly two years after the crash of a copter in Andhra Pradesh killing the then Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy and others on board.
Meanwhile, home secretary Pillai said that IAF helicopters from Dibrugarh and Jorhat would carry out an aerial recce on Sunday morning. He said there was some confusion about reports that the helicopter had been located but that actually it remained untraced till Saturday night. The Indian Air Force may also deploy its Sukhoi fighter aircraft with special equipment on board to try to locate the copter.
Just recently, a Pawan Hans copter had crashed at Tawang in Arunachal, killing 17 persons.