The Indian Air Force on Friday said the inquiry into the Mi-17 Coonoor crash on December 8 would be completed swiftly and people should respect those killed and not speculate about the cause of the accident.
“IAF has constituted a tri-service court of inquiry to investigate the cause of the tragic helicopter accident. The inquiry would be completed expeditiously & facts brought out. Till then, to respect the dignity of the deceased, uninformed speculation may be avoided,” the IAF said in a statement on Twitter.
The statement comes on the back of widespread speculation about what caused the crash.
The helicopter took off from the Sulur air base at 11.48 am with 14 people on board including chief of defence staff General Bipin Rawat and his wife Madhulika Raje Singh Rawat, and it was scheduled to land at the helipad at the Wellington golf course at 12.15 pm.
The air traffic control at Sulur, however, lost contact with the helicopter at 12.08 pm, 20 minutes after it took off, defence minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament on Thursday. The helicopter was seven minutes away from its destination.
At this point, it is not clear what went wrong with the helicopter in the final moments of the crash though the weather in the area where it went down did not have good visibility.
{{/usCountry}}At this point, it is not clear what went wrong with the helicopter in the final moments of the crash though the weather in the area where it went down did not have good visibility.
{{/usCountry}}Air Marshal Manavendra Singh is heading the inquiry into the crash.
The three-star officer, who is the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the IAF’s Bengaluru-based Training Command, has logged close to 7,000 flying hours in his 39-year career and operated in challenging sectors such as Siachen, the North-east, Uttarakhand, the western sector and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Search crews on Thursday recovered the helicopter’s black box that could give vital clues about what went wrong. The black box, which consists of the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), is a crash survivable unit.
The focus of the team investigating the crash will be on decrypting the black box data, which could take days.