Two army pilots were killed on Thursday when a Cheetah helicopter crashed in Arunachal Pradesh, the Kolkata-based Eastern Command said, with the accident turning the spotlight on the troubling safety record of the ageing choppers.

The Army Aviation helicopter lost radio contact with air traffic controllers at 9.15 am shortly before it went down in a mountainous region near Mandala, north-west of the 8,000-foot pass Bomdila, the army said in a statement. The helicopter had taken off from the army’s Missamari base in Assam for an operational sortie a few hours earlier.

“Five search parties of the Indian Army, the Sashastra Seema Bal and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police were immediately launched. The wreckage was found near Banglajaap village, east of Mandala,” the army said.

The army identified the two pilots killed in the crash as Lieutenant Colonel VVB Reddy and Maj Jayanth A.

A Cheetah helicopter costs ₹88 crore.

Reddy was 37 and is survived by his wife, an army dentist, and two daughters aged six and four. Jayanth was 35 and is survived by his wife. The army has ordered a court of inquiry into the crash. Bad weather has been blamed for several fatal crashes in Arunachal Pradesh.

The design of the Cheetah helicopters is more than half a century old, and their airworthiness has been called into question after a raft of accidents in recent years. India’s first chief of defence staff General Bipin Rawat survived a Cheetah crash in February 2015 in Dimapur when he was a lieutenant general. Rawat, who would have turned 65 on Thursday, was killed in a Mi-17 chopper crash along with 13 others near Coonoor in Tamil Nadu in December 2021.

For decades, the Cheetahs have played a crucial role in supporting the army’s deployments in high-altitude areas, including the Siachen glacier.

“The Cheetah has had an outstanding run, and has been the workhorse of the army and the air force in high altitude for decades. However, it is now old and due for replacement. We need to push the induction of the indigenous light utility helicopters (LUH) to replace the Cheetahs and the Chetaks,” said Air Marshal Anil Chopra (retd), director general, Centre for Air Power Studies.

The LUH, designed and developed by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), will replace the army and the Indian Air Force’s ageing fleets of Cheetah and Chetak helicopters. HAL expects the army and IAF to place combined orders for at least 187 light helicopters in the coming years. Cheetahs have been operated by the army and IAF, while Chetaks by all the three services.

HAL licence-produced 625 Cheetah and Chetak helicopters. It no longer builds them but is responsible for their maintenance and repair. In 1970, HAL signed an agreement with French aerospace firm Aerospatiale to produce Cheetahs, eight years after it tied up with another French firm, Sud-Aviation (now Airbus), to manufacture Chetaks.

In August 2014, India scrapped a ₹6,000-crore project to import light utility helicopters to replace Cheetah and Chetak helicopters, the third time the procurement was scrapped due to corruption allegations and technical issues.

The Kamov-226T light utility choppers, to be built jointly with Russia, were to replace the Cheetahs and Chetaks. However, the $1-billion programme never took off.

The army now plans to buy 110 LUHs. It has already ordered six limited series production LUHs and repeat orders will follow based on the performance of the first lot of helicopters. “We need it to be equipped with some more capabilities. HAL is working on it,” army chief General Manoj Pande said at Aero India 2023 held at Yelahanka airbase in Bengaluru in February.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February inaugurated the country’s largest helicopter manufacturing facility at Tumakuru in Karnataka. The HAL helicopter factory, spread across 615 acres, will initially produce LUHs followed by light combat helicopters (LCH) and later the Indian multirole helicopters (IMRH).

India has imposed a phased import ban on 411 different weapons and systems, including different types of helicopters, during the last three years to boost self-reliance in the defence sector. These are expected to be indigenised in phases over the next five to six years.

The latest Cheetah crash comes on the back of the three services and the coast guard grounding their fleets of the indigenous advanced light helicopter (ALH) for a comprehensive safety check after an Indian Navy ALH ditched into the Arabian Sea on March 8 following unexplained loss of power.

The military’s ALH fleets were grounded for the second time in less than five months. The platform was last grounded in October 2022 after an army Rudra helicopter, an armed version of ALH, crashed in Arunachal Pradesh, killing all five personnel on board.