Zeenews Bureau
Bangalore: A chopper of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) made an emergency landing on the roof of an apartment building in east suburb area in Bangalore on Thursday evening here due to some technical glitches.
According to reports, helicopter was being flown by two trainee pilots when it developed a technical glitch in the air. Both the pilot and the co-pilot escaped with minor injuries, police said.
"The Schweizer-300C helicopter of our rotary wing academy, which was on a training sortie, landed on top a building near BEML (Bharat Earth Movers Ltd), Kalyana Mantap in the eastern suburb. Its pilots Air Commodore (Retd) Roj Assey, 56, and trainee captain Digvijay Singh, 25, ejected safely with minor injuries," a HAL official said.
"Assey brought the chopper in control and decided to land atop the building as there was no open space available in the densely-populated locality," the official recalled.
The HAL helicopter was on a routine training sortie over the city for about 130 minutes when it suddenly lost altitude and descended before landing on the rooftop of a private building.
Though there was no damage to the building but the chopper suffered damage.
The company has ordered an inquiry to investigate the cause of the mishap.
Bangalore police said that they are waiting for DGCA experts to arrive at the accident scene and efforts are being made to bring down the chopper safely.
The residents of surrounding buildings were also evacuated to avoid any untoward incident.
Meanwhile, HAL Chief Test Pilot has given details of retrieval plans to a news channel.
He reportedly considered three options to bring down the crashed chopper. First is to dismantle the chopper into pieces and then bring it down, second is to use another chopper to lift it and third is to use a heavy lift crane to lift the crashed chopper.
First Published: Thursday, April 12, 2012, 17:48