Sulur chopper mishap: 'Poor weather conditions may have caused crash of Mi-17V-5', says ex-IAF pilot
Usually, during the training of pilots, there is a golden rule for pilots while flying in the hills and during cloudy weather. "If you are in clouds, you should be out of the hills and if you are in the hills there should be no clouds around," the former Indian Air Force pilot said. This was the mistake committed during the Mi17 V-5 crash during the Uttarakhand landslides in 2013 in which 20 lives were lost.
"The pilot then flew into the clouds and as such he could not see the hill. In the Coonoor crash, if there was an emergency, the pilot would have dropped the speed if visibility was poor. But seeing the impact and crash, it has all been burnt. The chopper seems to have impacted the ground at a high speed. The aircraft usually never falls like a stone," the former pilot in Chennai said.
"There is a lot of power available due to the rotor, blade and through auto rotation, it will be a controlled speed. It will topple, it will be damaged. But not to the extent of this crash, where everything is burnt. Without his realising the pilot could have hit a hill with hardly any time maneuver. He would have visualised the hill within a distance of 200 or 300 metres, which is hardly enough to reduce the speed when you are flying at 210 kilometre per hour," said the former pilot.
CHENNAI: It takes less than 20 minutes to fly from Sulur to Wellington by helicopter and the Mi-17V-5 is considered the one of the safest craft to fly. Mi-17V-5
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