No incident occurred involving CM Devendra Fadnavis’s helicopter: CMO

Mumbai: The office of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday denied occurrence of any incident involving his chopper in which he was said to have escaped unhurt. An official earlier had claimed that Fadnavis today escaped unhurt in a freak incident in which his helicopter lifted off and tilted over him even as he waited near its door to board it on his way back to Mumbai from Raigad. 

Seeing the chopper tilt over the chief minister, his security personnel rushed and pulled him away to safety, the official had claimed. But the chief minister’s office strongly denied occurrence of any such incident saying there was no accident at all. “Rumours are being spread that the CM’s helicopter was involved in an accident. There was no such accident. People should not believe rumours,” it said.

Fadnavis had gone to Raigad today to attend the birthday celebrations of PWP leader Jayant Patil and to inaugurate an auditorium. On May 25, Fadnavis had a narrow escape when his chopper got entangled in overhead wires and crash-landed in Latur district of Maharashtra after the pilot tried to descend due to bad weather soon after the take-off. An initial probe conducted by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) into the incident had prima-facie found lapses on the part of the pilot.

“The pilot failed to assess the load on the helicopter on a day of high temperature. Since heat makes it harder for a chopper/aircraft to get off the ground, he should not have taken off with almost full load,” an AAIB official had said. The state government’s six-year-old Sikorsky chopper was damaged beyond repair in the May 25 accident.