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Dhruvs to be airborne next week

The Dhruv advanced light helicopters of the armed forces, which were grounded after the crash of a newly built chopper in November last, will take off next week.

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BANGALORE: The Dhruv advanced light helicopters of the armed forces, which were grounded after the crash of a newly built chopper in November last, will take off next week.
The move to allow 46 Dhruv's airborne comes after the manufacturer Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) conducted stringent stress checks on the tail rotor blades of the choppers in service.

A tail rotor defect caused the indigenous chopper with a military registration headed to Jharkhand to crash in Karimnagar of Andhra Pradesh, which has been identified to a flaw in the composite imported from Switzerland to produce the tail rotor blades.

The chopper, intended for the Jharkhand police and VIP duties, was the first to be flown in the batch of 20 helicopters with the faulty blades, while others are still in the production line.

“All the Dhruv helicopters will be cleared to fly in the next few days. It is not a major problem and things have been rectified,” HAL Chairman Ashok K Baweja told DNA on Friday.

The accident - the second of Dhruv - from a height of 5,000 feet, claims HAL, demonstrates the crash worthiness of the chopper, as there was no fuel leak and not much damage to the structure of the aircraft. The tail rotor sheared off the copter, but the pilot managed to bring it to ground using the auto pilot system.

Dhruv has flown a total of 12,000 hours since the test phase in the early 1990's.

A Dhruv gifted to the Royal Nepal Army crashed in October 2004, due to a tail rotor system flaw near Lumbini in the Himalayan Kingdom, which has since then repaired.

HAL requested its customers to ground the Dhruv's in their fleet immediately and ordered an inquiry led by a general manager Ashok Nayak. The certifying agencies - Cemilac and DGCA, besides the army, navy, coast guard and the air force are part of the team that will submit its report next week. Nayak declined to comment on the issue.

“The faulty blades are withdrawn. We conducted tests on the blades of Dhruv's in service and did not find any flaws,” HAL Rotary Wing chief test pilot Wg Cdr C D Upadhyay said.

It is a standard practice world over that whenever an accident happens, the whole fleet stops flying till an inquiry is completed, he said. HAL said that tail rotors cause problems in many helicopter programmes of the world, a point seconded by the Rotary Wing Society of India, (RWSI), an association of professionals in this field.

“In the US, every other day, there is a helicopter crash which is mainly due to the tail rotor snags. There is nothing wrong with the Dhruv incident,” RWSI President Air Marshal (Retd) K Sridharan said.

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