Chandigarh: The recent crash of an Indian Coast Guard (ICG)-operated indigenously designed and manufactured Dhruv advanced light helicopter (ALH), in which three of its personnel died, yet again raises serious safety and reliability issues concerning the rotary wing platform, recurringly involved in accidents since its induction into service in 2002.
The latest of 23 accidents, all involving the twin-engine Dhruv and its four variants, in which at least 17 military personnel and around 12 others, including servicemen, had died, occurred during a routine training sortie at Porbandar in Gujarat on January 5, killing its two-man crew and one diver on board.
Thereafter, all 330-odd Dhruvs developed and series-built by the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in Bengaluru and in service with all three armed forces, the ICG, the Border Security Force and some civilian organisations, were grounded to execute safety checks.
These include inspecting the ALHs’ ‘stress points’ like engines, rotor blades and power transmission lines, in addition to upper and lower control systems, main tail and rotor assemblies and actuators.
This latest ALH grounding follows at least four earlier ones from 2005 onwards that took place for varying periods and has raised doubts over its customary participation in the upcoming Republic Day fly-past in New Delhi on January 26.
Army chief says forces 100% confident in Dhruv, but not everyone agrees
Tellingly, Dhruv did not take part in the fly-past over the 77th Army Day parade in Pune on Wednesday, where the Indian Army chief of staff General Upendra Dwivedi dismissed the ICG crash as “a small accident”.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the parade, he declared that like the best of the world’s helicopters, such accidents “keep happening” but that the forces had 100% confidence in this rotary platform.
But many of General Dwivedi’s former colleagues, several of whom actually operated or supervised Dhruvs whilst in service, strongly disagree.
Captain Sanjay Karve, who served as examiner and instructor on two helicopter types in the Indian Navy (IN), declared that from day one, when HAL began Dhruv deliveries, the acceptance crews of the army, air force and navy had complaints regarding the aircraft.
But under pressure from the respective service headquarters (HQs), it was inducted following HAL’s assurances that these deficiencies and defects would be rectified – but they never were, he told India Today television on January 10.
Moreover, anyone who put their foot down over Dhruv’s failings was labelled “anti-service” and “hell-bent” on ensuring that indigenously sourced aircraft did not fly, he said.
The naval aviator further stated that HAL, for whom the Indian military was a “captive customer”, believed it could get away with anything, firm in the conviction that all service HQs would “buckle down” under pressure from the government into accepting the (operationally unsound) Dhruv’s.
“No aircrew wants to operate an unsafe machine, knowing fully well that it could kill its passengers,” the IN aviator declared, blaming all three service HQs and HAL for agreeing to receive a flawed platform.
As part of the same TV programme debate, veteran helicopter pilot Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur said India simply could not afford to have such a (poor) flight safety record for a helicopter that was the flagship of its aviation industry.
To redress this, he suggested instituting an independent board of varied experts to recommend measures to HAL to augment Dhruv’s quality control, thus boosting the service’s overall confidence in the platform.
However, previously, he disappointingly added, such advice emanating from an official inquiry he had headed into the first-ever Dhruv crash in Bengaluru in 2007 had taken HAL years to implement.
‘Wouldn’t be surprising if failures in Dhruv’s control rods occur again’
Industry sources said previous Dhruv crashes had in 2023 revealed astonishing technical design flaws in its aluminum booster control rods, which are vital to a helicopter’s flight control system, relaying mechanical signals from the pilot to both the main and tail rotors and managing the helicopter’s all-round manoeuvrability.
These legacy rods were then replaced with more robust steel ones, but according to former IN test pilot Captain K.P. Sanjeev Kumar, HAL and the Bengaluru-based Centre for Military Airworthiness and Certification (CEMILAC) merely ended up ‘making peace’ with the control rod issue without going to the root of the problem.
Writing in his blog Kaypius, which was reproduced in The Wire on January 9, he warned that it would not be surprising if such ‘catastrophic failures (in Dhruv’s control rods) raised their head again’. He went on to state that HAL’s “something broken, something fixed” approach was neither new nor surprising, and yet the services seemed happy to go along with it.
Captain Kumar also blamed HAL for not sharing component failure and accident data with the services and the ICG, even though they collectively operated over 330 ALHs between them. “It is incomprehensible why safety critical information, data pertaining to failure rate of components and accident reports should not be easily accessible to all users on a common grid.”
Dhruv’s accident record extends outside India too
Meanwhile, not included in Dhruv’s tally of 23 domestic accidents are the four of seven ALHs that crashed soon after HAL exported them to the Ecuador Air Force (EAF) in 2008-09 for $42.5 million. These crashes led to Ecuador eventually terminating its ALH contract with HAL in October 2015, in a major setback to what was then the first ever major export of an indigenous military platform.
At the time, Ecuadorian defence minister Fernando Cordero had told reporters in the capital Quito that two of these four crashes were due to ‘mechanical failure’, and that the remaining three Dhruvs had subsequently been grounded by the EAF.
HAL, for its part, countered those claims by maintaining that ‘human error’ and poor maintenance by the EAF was responsible for two of the four Dhruv crashes.
The first Dhruv had crashed in Ecuador soon after its delivery to the EAF in 2009 whilst making a low pass at a military parade in Quito, while the second accident occurred in February 2014, killing three of four people on board.
These were followed by two back-to-back crashes within a fortnight of each other in early January 2015, which ultimately decided the EAF against continuing to operate the ALHs.
Conversely, HAL, which had completed Dhruv deliveries to Ecuador by 2012, contested Quito’s claims that it had failed to ship helicopter spares to the EAF on schedule. A HAL spokesman had then maintained that the Dhruv’s service and maintenance were “exclusively” the EAF’s responsibility, as the 24-month warranty period for it to provide after-sales service support for the seven ALHs had expired.
But he had conceded that HAL was “more than willing” to offer the EAF “all and any” assistance that it required to keep the remaining three Dhruvs operational, a proposal Quito summarily rejected and scrapped the deal.
The termination of the ALH buy by the EAF was, without doubt, a serious stumbling block for HAL in a field where flight safety remains the primary concern, and where stiff competition from established Western helicopter manufacturers in the US and Europe endured.
In early 2022, the then-HAL head C.B. Ananthakrishnan had optimistically claimed that countries like Argentina, the Philippines and Egypt were interested in acquiring the ALH and its light combat helicopter derivative. But all overseas enthusiasm for procuring Dhruv evaporated after an ALH ‘Rudra’ multi-role weapon systems integrated Mk III crashed in Arunachal later that year.
“Considering HAL and the government’s heightened pitch for exporting indigenous defence equipment and platforms, the ALH still remains a work in progress and will have to earn all prospective importers’ trust in its operational efficiency,” said a senior industry official.
Its reliability and operational safety will be the key to its success as a saleable product, but that seems to be periodically taking a serious hit, he cautioned, declining to be identified.
