A helicopter carrying six people crashed into a hillside near Chai village in Chamoli district on Friday, about an hour after it lifted off from Badrinath. Everyone on board was killed.
The aircraft belonged to Trans Bharat Aviation Pvt Ltd. Prateek Jain, CEO of the Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority (UCADA), said the helicopter left for the Sahastradhara heliport in Dehradun at 1.14 pm. Contact was lost while it crossed the Joshimath valley, and its tracking system stopped showing a position. For some time it was reported only as missing.
The wreckage was later traced to a spot above Chai village, near an Army camp. Officials put the crash at around 2.20 pm, on a hillside close to the JP Power House near Marwari Bridge.
Chamoli Superintendent of Police Surjit Singh Panwar said the bodies had been found but not yet recovered.
The pilot was Captain Himanshu Sabharwal. The five passengers, all from Bengaluru, were identified by police as Prathapa, Arun, Shankar Gowda, Sudheer K and H S Natraja.
Reports from Karnataka say the group included a police inspector from the city's Central Crime Branch and a lawyer, and several outlets describe the passengers as pilgrims returning from Badrinath.
Teams from the Chamoli district administration, police, the State Disaster Response Force, the Army and the ITBP were sent to the site. Rain, thick cloud and snowfall slowed movement on the slope and made it hard to pin down the exact location in the first hours.
Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said on X that a joint rescue operation was under way and that he was monitoring the situation.
UCADA moved quickly on the operator. As a precaution, it grounded every helicopter in the Trans Bharat Aviation fleet while the circumstances are examined.
Conditions across the region were poor. The India Meteorological Department had an orange alert in place for thunderstorms, hail and strong winds, and Kedarnath saw its first heavy snowfall of the season after continuous snow from Thursday. Rainfall and snow were also forecast along the Badrinath-Joshimath stretch.
Several outlets point to weather as a likely factor. That is a suspicion, not a finding. Nobody has said yet whether the pilot ran into sudden cloud, a downdraft or something mechanical, and the flight recorder data, if recoverable, will matter a great deal. In earlier Uttarakhand crashes, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) led the inquiry, which is the usual route for accidents of this kind.
This is not the first time Char Dham airspace has made the news for the wrong reasons. In May 2025, a helicopter heading to Gangotri crashed near Gangnani in Uttarkashi and killed six people. A month later, seven people died when a Bell 407 went down near Gaurikund after taking off from Kedarnath. Indian media at the time described that one as the fifth such incident in under two months.
The Civil Aviation Ministry has reported six helicopter accidents in Uttarakhand between 2023 and 2025.
Safety audits have flagged gaps that go beyond individual pilots. According to a Hindustan Times report from November 2025, an AAIB finding showed that weather updates were not passed to operators for nearly four hours on one morning, because a power cut hit the computer used to circulate them and there was no backup. Separately, Deccan Herald reported in June 2025 that action had been taken against Trans Bharat Aviation after reports that two of its helicopters operated in bad weather. Whether anything from those episodes bears on Friday's crash is not known.
Several questions are likely to come up once the AAIB or another agency takes charge:
- What weather information the pilot and the operator had at 1.14 pm, and whether it matched what the sky was doing.
- Who made the decision to fly, and under what rules.
- Whether the helicopter was flying under visual conditions in a valley where cloud can close in within minutes.
None of these has an answer yet.
Recovery of the bodies from the hillside is the immediate task, and the weather will decide how fast that goes. After that, the bodies will be handed to families, most of whom are in Bengaluru and will have to make the long journey back from the hills.
The grounding of the Trans Bharat Aviation fleet will also affect pilgrims who had booked flights with the company, though other operators continue to run services. The state and the aviation regulator will be under pressure to explain what changes, if any, follow. This story is still developing, and details may change as officials release more information.
