| Last fortnight, Haryana minister Surinder Singh was flying with cabinet colleague O.P. Jindal in Jindal's sleek new single-engined Eurocopter Colibri when it suddenly plunged down from the sky in less than a minute and crashed into the fields at a sleepy village near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Both ministers, en route to Delhi from Chandigarh, were instantly killed in the crash.  | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | FINAL REST: The chopper that carried Jindal and Singh | | Some have been lucky. Two years ago, actor-producer Sanjay Khan, who has had more than one close shave with death, was on the campaign trail in north Karnataka with liquor baron Vijay Mallya when the tail of their McDonnell Douglas 520N chopper broke off. The chopper spun out of control, dropped out of the sky like a stone and hit the ground. Fortunately, the chopper hit a patch of slushy soil, skid-first. "I just remember Vijay saying, 'Bhai, we're going down', and a blur of sky and ground,'' says Khan. In the past five years alone, helicopters have crashed into mountains, fallen into fields and smashed into trees. Besides one of the worst copter crashes of a Mi-172 near the Bombay High oilfields in 2003 which killed 25 people, five crashes in the past four years have killed seven politicians, including four state ministers, a Lok Sabha Speaker and two MLAs. | | FATAL FLIGHT | | | SURINDER SINGH, O.P. JINDAL: March 2005, Saharanpur | | 10 PEOPLE, INCLUDING TWO MEGHALAYA MLAS AND A STATE MINISTER: September 2004, Guwahati | | 25 ONGC EMPLOYEES: August 2003, Bombay High | | G.M.C. BALAYOGI, LOK SABHA SPEAKER: March 2002, Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh | | NEAR MISSES | | CONGRESS LEADERS AHMED PATEL, KUMARI SELJA, PRITHVIRAJ CHAUHAN: March 2004, Khanvel, Gujarat | | A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM, THEN SCIENTIFIC ADVISER TO GOVERNMENT OF INDIA: Sept 2001, Bokaro, Jharkhand | | Even these VIP deaths haven't goaded a change in safety standards. Consider this, the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has just one helicopter inspector for monitoring the airworthiness, safety and maintenance standards of the 187 helicopters in the country when aviation experts say there should be at least 10 inspectors. The post, created after the ONGC crash, has been lying vacant for the past four months after the previous occupant retired. "It is for private operators to ensure all safety standards are complied with,'' says a DGCA spokesperson. "Besides, the DGCA cannot go around making inspections. It is a regulatory body for technical aspects.'' But such buck-passing doesn't help the cause of already skewed accident rates of civil aviation to general aviation (essentially business and private use). The world over, the ratio of civil aviation to general aviation (both planes and choppers) is a steep 1:20 or 20 crashes in general aviation for every crash in civil aviation. This is because general aviation aircraft operate out of remote areas and rough airfields with no access to technical facilities or even vital parameters like cloud base and weather reports. "There is no safety culture in general and helicopter aviation,'' laments H.S. Khola, former DGCA. "Inadequacy of surveillance is the bane of this sector.'' Khola feels a large workforce of inspectors could help get the private operators on their toes to enforce safety norms. Helicopters cost between Rs 14 crore and Rs 20 crore a piece. It is 11 times more expensive to maintain a helicopter than a fixed-wing aircraft of similar passenger capacity. They are inherently less safer than fixed-wing aircraft by design-they have more moving parts like gears and shafts-and operate closer to the ground. When bad weather forces them to fly low, pilots have to visually navigate ground obstacles like hills, high tension wires and trees which often leads to crashes. Each accident has led to an enquiry committee, which sometimes highlights lax safety norms followed by private aviation firms. The DGCA enquiry into the Bombay High crash, for instance, revealed that the Mi-172 helicopter had crashed owing to a combination of poor maintenance and pilot error. During elections, when helicopters turn into airborne raths and politicians heli-hop rallies, safety norms are jettisoned through the window. Politicians treat pilots like taxi drivers and choppers like motor cars and insist on flying even in inclement weather. "There are pressures to fly with unserviceable aircraft during polls,'' admits a senior pilot. "It is the time charter companies get to make Rs 45,000-65,000 per hour and politicians want to extract maximum value for money, so everybody takes chances.'' Only, the chance can be with their lives. RELATED STORIES: Losing Might Tragedy at Sea Brings Skeletons to the Surface
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