• by Ranjit Devraj (new delhi)
• Friday, September 11, 2009
• Inter Press Service

After an aviation accident claimed yet another of India’s top leaders recently, experts are calling for stricter controls on the use of helicopters and small aircraft by politicians in a hurry to reach their destinations.

Investigators from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and other agencies looking into the Sep. 2 crash of a Bell-430 helicopter, which killed the chief minister of southern Andhra Pradesh state, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, and four others on board, are probing why the pilot flew into inclement weather and took a major deviation from the set flight path to slam into a hillside.

These initial findings were based on preliminary statements from the DGCA and the military officials who visited the crash site.

Reddy belonged to the Congress Party, which has lost several of its top leaders to aviation accidents. In 2001 Madhav Rao Scindia, considered by many to be prime minister material, died when his chartered Cessna blew up in mid-air soon after taking off from the national capital towards Kanpur in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state.

The biggest loss to the ruling political party as a result of such mishaps was the death of Sanjay Gandhi, the son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in 1980. He was flying an aerobatic plane over New Delhi when it nose-dived.

'It cannot be denied that pilots flying VIPs (very important persons) do come under benign pressure to complete their missions,' K. Sridharan, a former air vice-marshal and leading expert on helicopter aviation, told IPS in an interview. 'Pilots are trained to withstand such pressures, but they may have their careers to think of.'

He said what state agencies should determine deeply was whether the pilot of the chopper carrying Reddy was flying under ‘benign pressure’ from his passenger.

A pilot who does not fly as ordered by his superiors is likely to be fired or suffer some penalty, said Sridharan. ‘Benign pressure’ may mean anything from obliging an influential or powerful passenger to pilots hoping to seek favours from him, he said.

'Influential individuals often pressure pilots to undertake missions in violation of established rules and regulations, causing unnecessary tension and strain to the pilots, which is not conducive for safety,’’ said Sridharan, who is also the founder of the Rotary Wing Society of India (RWSI), a volunteer agency that promotes civilian helicopter flying and maintains records and statistics.

Politicians are known to make frequent air dashes to their constituencies in the remotest parts of the vast Indian sub-continent. This is perceived as part of their efforts to nurture their constituencies -- often through mass contact programmes that allow them to interact with the people and distribute welfare assistance, among others. Such trips are made not only at election time but throughout their terms in power. Their target areas are often reachable only by helicopters for lack of roads and basic infrastructure.

Sidhar said Reddy apparently ignored warnings of dangerous cumulonimbus cloud formations, signalling bad weather, on his flight path from the state capital of Hyderabad to Chittoor district to monitor a mass contact programme, for which he had already clocked up 100 hours of flying over the last four months.

An emergency landing of a chopper carrying Reddy last year while on his way to Narasaraopet, a town in Andhra Pradesh, prompted an investigation by the DGCA. It suggested that the official’s apparent impatience to reach his destination could have led to the incident.

Flying regulations forbid the landing of helicopters at unauthorised places unless there is an emergency. But these are known to have been violated by politicians.

For instance, an eyewitness report by a correspondent of a local weekly, ‘Outloook’, indicated that a former chief minister of eastern Bihar state, Laloo Prasad Yadav, had ordered his pilot to land in a clearing just to seek directions to a rally he was to address.

'On one election trip, the pilot couldn’t find the rally site because of the inaccurate coordinates provided. Finally, at Laloo’s insistence, we landed in a field in the middle of nowhere to seek directions -- a clear violation of flying regulations since there was no emergency,' said Smita Gupta in her article.

According to Sridharan, pilots generally avoid making precautionary landings -- which are made to avoid flying into trouble such as bad weather -- because of the long and tedious procedures they need to follow when reporting to aviation authorities. Hence they are forced to make emergency landings.

That pilots make judgment errors cannot be ruled out as well. In 2002, G.M.C. Balayogi, speaker of the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament), died after the pilot of his chopper mistook a pond for a clearing while making an emergency landing under adverse weather conditions.

Human error, according to RWSI studies, is a major reason for civilian chopper crashes in India and attributable to 22 of the 41 major helicopter accidents that occurred between June 1990 and April 2005.

The 2005 chopper crash which killed Surender Singh and Om Prakash Jindal, ministers in the Haryana state cabinet, was caused by a combination of mechanical fault and pilot error. Their chopper was flying from Chandigarh, capital of Haryana in northern India, to New Delhi. But it took a deviation to Gogarpur village on Jindal’s orders, where he owned a sugar mill.

The DGCA investigation report said the pilot should have noticed a change in engine temperature but failed to do so.

Manjit Singh Sekhon, one of India’s most experienced fliers and a former air marshal, said that while there has been a rapid expansion of the civilian helicopter fleet in India in recent years, training and infrastructure have seriously lagged.

Pilots, for instance, are not getting enough training in instrument flying (where they refer only to the aircraft instrument panel and high frequency radio for navigation), partly because they are usually flying in remote areas where ground support for instrument flying is unavailable. Many constituencies do not even have proper roads.

The number of India’s civilian helicopters has jumped from 60 in 1994 to 245 by 2009, according to RWSI figures. Yet India has no dedicated heliport to this day. There are also no standard regulations for flying helicopters in the country’s 28 states, which range from the high altitude Himalayan regions to coastal plains and thick tropical jungles.

'It is not well appreciated, for example, that clouds and hills make a deadly combination for chopper pilots, and this is apparently what happened in Reddy’s case,’’ Sekhon said. 'A controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) can happen in a matter of 10 to 15 seconds.’’

CFIT, or a helicopter crashing into terrain, obstacles or water, with the pilot unaware of what is happening, has accounted for 53 percent of chopper fatalities since 1990.

RWSI studies also show that pilots who have not received adequate instrument flying training practice with flight simulators are prone to fall victim to CFIT.

'Flying is unavoidable for political leaders trying to cover a large country like India,' said Jayanti Natarajan, spokeswoman for the Congress party. 'But we certainly are concerned at the large number of aviation accidents.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service