The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) faced arguably its lowest point in history when the service lost its second Advanced Light Helicopter Mark III Maritime Role (ALH Mk3 MR) in four months. CG 859 crashed at Porbandar airport around 12:15 pm on Sunday, January 5, while on a routine training sortie. Videos shared by onlookers show the helicopter engulfed in flames on the runway shoulder. Three crew onboard – Commandant Saurabh, Deputy Commandant S.K. Yadav and Pradhan Navik Manoj – were recovered from the wreckage and shifted to Government Hospital, Porbandar, but it was too late. All three crew members perished in the crash.
Unprecedented losses
On September 2, 2024, another ICG ALH, CG 863, had crashed into the sea off Porbandar while on a night medevac mission killing both pilots and one Air Chief Marshal (ACM) (D). The board of inquiry into that accident would perhaps have just concluded before CG 859 from the same squadron became a smouldering wreck at the same home base. The ICG has now lost three of the 16 newly-inducted ALH Mk3 MR with a sobering loss of six lives. 835 Squadron (CG) Porbandar has been whittled down to two helicopters, with more than half the squadron’s flight crew wiped out in ALH crashes.
Though the army and the Indian Air Force (IAF) have had more than their share of ALH losses, this tragic turn is unprecedented in ICG’s history. Indian Army’s 254 army aviation squadron, for instance, lost two ALH Mk4 “Rudra” in less than seven months in 2021 (both fatal). For the ICG, the latest crash makes it three hull losses of the ALH Mk3 MR in less than two years. It is a damning statistic produced by the cruel intersection of design, execution and Human Factors Analysis and Classification System; definitely not something to be normalised.
Preliminary eyewitness accounts
A preliminary eyewitness account quoting Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) onsite team indicates that the helicopter completed one training sortie of about 90 minutes, did a “running change” (crew changeover with rotors running) and left for the next training sortie in which it crashed. As per a report shared on social media, the helicopter apparently crashed nose-down from hover at 200 feet. This is at variance with another version that the helicopter spun out of control and crashed left of the runway during a go-around. The board will have to seek out more eyewitnesses including video footage, if any, and corroborate these with Cockpit Voice and Flight Data Recorder (CVFDR) data to piece together the accident. Unlike service airfields where every take-off and landing is video recorded, civil airports such as Porbandar run by the Airports Authority of India are not required to do so. However, air traffic controllers on duty will be able to give a more reliable account of the last moments of CG 859.
It is understood that the CVFDR has since been shifted to Bengaluru for analysis. Decoding, analysing and making sense of this data could take anything from a few days to months, depending on the post-crash integrity of the “black box” and investigation protocols involved. While the board investigates the circumstances that brought down CG 859, a few issues germane to ALH and its chequered history beg a revisit.
Control actuator issue
Fractured control rods in the flight control chain of the ALH have led to at least half a dozen crashes, some fatal. In some cases, the post-crash fire consumed the evidence while in some recent crashes, the retrieved broken rod provided telltale evidence. This writer had explained the issue of “collective eye-end failure” and “booster rod failure” after a fatal army aviation ALH crash in Arunachal Pradesh. Major failures in a helicopter’s flight control chain will almost always be catastrophic. Certification thus requires such a high level of reliability and redundancy of hydraulics and the entire flight control chain as to preclude a major failure in the entire life of the fleet. However, it took multiple accidents and copybook ditching of naval ALH Mk3 MR IN 709 off Mumbai in March 2023 for HAL and military certification authority Centre for Military Airworthiness & Certification (CEMILAC) to confront the issue with the seriousness it deserved.
After the IN 709 ditching and the fleetwide grounding that followed, HAL recalled all existing ALH control rods for load tests and subsequent replacement of legacy control rods with stainless steel ones. This approach suggests that the loads on legacy control rods were either outside design limits or the design/metallurgy of the component was suspect. However, HAL agreed to neither and, according to Hindustan Times, blamed the failure on maintenance error and called the new rods as “design improvement.” It is my reading that the services, HAL and CEMILAC have made peace with the control rod issue without going to the root of the problem. It will thus not be surprising if such catastrophic failure raises its head again. This “something broken, something fixed” approach of HAL is neither new nor surprising. Yet, the services seem happy to go along.
An uneven playing field
One of the reasons for the inability of services to take HAL to task is the unequal playing field the Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) enjoys while dealing with its customers. Nowhere is it more prominent than in the access to data related to component failures and accidents. The services operate in silos and are loath to share their internal travails in the fleet with other users. While HAL has almost complete access to this data across services, individual users do not have access to a common repository of such data. This is a serious systemic flaw that needs to be plugged. The three services and ICG together operate over 330 ALH. It is incomprehensible why safety-critical information, data pertaining to failure rate of components and reasons thereof, and accident reports should not be easily accessible to all users on a common grid.
Performance Based Logistics (PBL)
This writer had flagged serious concerns about the PBL clause loading the dice against a fledgling service (ICG) grappling with its first major induction of a complex machine. It is not clear on what basis and for whose benefit the 75% aircraft availability and 45 hr/mo/ac figure was arrived at. The relentless pressure to maximise gains from the PBL contract by flying 45 hours per month should have been reviewed after the CG 863 accident. From all accounts, the coast guard’s existing bench strength of pilots and maintainers have been hard put to deliver this quantum of flying. Also, the question begs answering whether HAL would have deputed the best of their support crew for four dispersed locations across India. Was there a case to throttle back on monthly flying task till at least the CG 863 accident report was reviewed and course corrections implemented? Now that tragedy has revisited Porbandar, maybe the authorities will pause to listen to whatever boots are left on the ground.
Major failures that go under the radar
The shocking failure rate of key components of the ALH across services also needs to be investigated by an independent agency with no affiliation to HAL. It is reliably learnt that between 12-14 main gear boxes or Integrated Dynamic System (IDS), as it is known in the ALH, have had to be withdrawn from a newly-inducted fleet of 16 helicopters of the ICG alone. The other services have their own horror stories. In which part of the world would this be acceptable? Add to this frequent instances of hydraulic failure, main gearbox chip failure, multifunction display failure, engine failure and so on have become par for the course. There have been at least three recent cases of “power loss” (single engine failure) on ALH in as many months that have gone unreported in the largely lazy defence beat of Indian media. While individual services window dress their statistics and hoard such information, the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) gets a long rope to escape each time.
HAL is not entirely to blame for this. Any OEM with a bottom line to protect will take the easier route if the customer allows them too. Watchdogs like CEMILAC, Regional Centre for Military Airworthiness and Directorate General of Quality Assurance are busy playing the proverbial ostrich while people die. It is a lamentable state of affairs that calls for an independent investigation and a holistic appraisal. Presently, the murder weapon and the evidence has been presented to the accused himself. It is akin to the police investigating police brutality, for want of a darker metaphor.
Design gaps that manifest as pilot error
A little-known and far less-researched area of ALH is design gaps that may manifest as “pilot error” or “maintenance error/shortfall” (a term now replaced by “human error” but I use it here intentionally). I give you just a few examples from the top of my head so that it may inform future design:
- Providing a trigger-guard on the “AFCS (Automatic Flight Control System) off” switch that can be inadvertently operated by a pilot tightening his/her grip on the cyclic. In a stressful situation or in the incipient stages of spatial disorientation or inadvertent Instrument Meteorological Conditions, this can lead to a loss of control in-flight.
- Integrating and enclosing upper controls inside the IDS, thus hampering daily inspection of critical flight control components (maintenance).
- Designing lateral and longitudinal control rods that are capable of being installed wrongly (CG 855 crash at Kochi, 2024).
- A rotor and flight control design that brought a new term into ALH pilots’ lexicon – lateral cyclic control saturation.
- Four-bladed rotor system that became a nightmare for vibration control, leading to innumerable maintenance flights.
- Nuisance warnings generated by Helicopter Terrain Awareness and Warning Systems that incentivises pilots to disable the system, thus denying them the protection it was meant to provide.
In my experience, HAL has always resorted to band-aid fixes and additional warning or cautions rather than walking back a design, that too after much blood was spilt. Ego and pet peeves have often ruled over prudence and a long-term perspective on safety. Regulators and certification authorities have stepped in far too late, if at all. If the last gate of safety in HAL – the elite team of test pilots and test engineers in HAL Flight Operations – also start toeing the party line rather than going for “precision and excellence” in flight testing, we are looking at a very bleak future.
Where is the incentive to improve?
Reproducing a paragraph from a blog I wrote in 2018 sounds apt for the occasion:
“In my time with the industry, I have seen up close young, bright minds, eager to ‘make a dent in the universe’ like Steve Jobs. Working in aerospace design and development is a dream many young Indians will die for. But the entry barriers are huge, quality benchmarks are nebulous, you need chacha batija connections to get inside. Once you join a PSU like HAL, a safe, secure job awaits you. Unions protect the workers’ interests while middle and senior management run around like headless chicken. Test crew – all former military pilots – can’t look beyond their noses. Narrow parochial interests and hubris pervades all discussion.”
Nothing has changed. This is where we have parked all our hopes for the future.
In a way, the services, drawn into a deadly embrace with their tormentors, with undefined atma nirbharta goals and well-defined import-ban lists, have invited this misery upon themselves. Strategic partnership model for boosting Make in India and private sector participation in big-ticket aerospace and defence manufacturing in India is all but dead. All we have is a public sector behemoth with zero competition and orders on a platter for the foreseeable future. To expect world-class quality and commitment to safety in this scenario is to live in a fool’s paradise. This aspect was dwelt upon by none other than IAF ACM A.P. Singh while speaking at a recent seminar.
Earlier (10-15 years ago), there was token resistance to the shenanigans of these sloth-laden PSUs and some hard talk was possible. Now there is none. One even felt a sliver of hope that the right-wing Narendra Modi government would be able to bring in competition or straighten out the inefficiencies of these PSUs. Even that has proven to be a pipe dream. Very soon, our forces will be taking dictation from PSUs on how to write specifications or dilute products. The Indian armed forces in general and the rotary wing in particular will ultimately pay the price in blood for this shameless charade where monopoly rules the roost in a monopsony.
If the long trail of blood and the latest crash of CG 859 does not shake our collective conscience, I do not know what will.
