Trans Bharat Helicopter VT-HCX Crashes Near Joshimath, Killing All Six on Board

A Trans Bharat Aviation helicopter, VT-HCX, crashed into a hillside near Joshimath in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district on October 30, 2026, killing the pilot and all five passengers. It was flying from Badrinath to the Sahastradhara helipad in Dehradun.

Prateek Jain, chief executive of the Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority (UCADA), confirmed the six deaths to the ANI news agency, LatestLY reported. UCADA said it had grounded Trans Bharat’s entire fleet as a precaution.

What is known about the flight

Chamoli police chief Surjeet Singh Panwar said in a video statement that the helicopter left the Badrinath civil helipad at about 1:12 pm. UCADA’s account, carried by PTI and published by The Week, put the departure at about 1:15 pm and identified the helicopter as VT-HCX.

The two accounts differ on when the helicopter dropped out of contact. Panwar said its transmission link with radar was lost near Joshimath at 1:14 pm, while UCADA said it lost communication over the Joshimath valley and went missing at around 2:20 pm.

According to Panwar, soldiers at an Army post saw the helicopter heading into the valley about 0.6 miles (1 km) above the Bhandakand temple near Pandukeshwar. An Army Signal Centre team also reported seeing smoke from the helicopter as it descended rapidly, ANI said in a report carried by Business Today.

Officials told PTI the helicopter struck a hillside near the JP Power House by Marwari Bridge at about 2:20 pm, ThePrint reported. Panwar confirmed that the bodies of all six had been found at the site.

Police named the pilot as Captain Himanshu, and ANI gave his full name as Himanshu Sabharwal, a Delhi resident. The five passengers were all men from Bengaluru, in Karnataka.

Teams from the police, the State Disaster Response Force, the Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police went to the crash site, with a drone sent from Gopeshwar to help the search.

What is still unknown

No official source has given the helicopter’s model or a cause. Trans Bharat’s website describes a fleet of three Bell 407s, the Free Press Journal reported, but no statement has tied VT-HCX to a type.

The India Meteorological Department had an orange alert in force for Chamoli that day, warning of thunderstorms, hail and gusty winds, National Herald reported. Officials have not linked the weather to the crash, and Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said he was monitoring the situation.

At the time of writing, India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) had published no statement on this crash. It investigated both fatal pilgrimage-helicopter crashes in Uttarakhand in 2025.

A pilgrimage route with a hard safety record

Badrinath is one of the four Char Dham shrines, and helicopters carry pilgrims through narrow Himalayan valleys where the weather changes often. Most of these flights are single-pilot operations in small helicopters without flight data recorders, the AAIB has noted.

In its final report on the June 15, 2025 crash of an Aryan Aviation Bell 407 near Gaurikund, the AAIB counted nine occurrences in the Char Dham sector from 2015 to 2025. Eight were accidents, five of them fatal, and one was a serious incident.

The AAIB found there had been at least one accident or serious incident every year since 2022, and four accidents in May and June 2025 alone. It said most stemmed from crew handling and decision-making in adverse weather or at high altitude, not from aircraft serviceability.

The Gaurikund crash killed all seven on board. The pilot flew into cloud at the exit of the Kedarnath valley, became disoriented while turning and hit terrain at about 9,000 feet, according to the report, the loss of orientation pilots call spatial disorientation.

Five weeks earlier, on May 8, 2025, an Aerotrans Services Bell 407 crashed at Gangnani in Uttarkashi district after its main rotor struck an overhead fiber cable during an attempted road landing. The AAIB’s preliminary report says the pilot and five passengers died and one passenger was seriously injured.

Those accidents led the DGCA to amend its pilgrimage-flying circular in September 2025, adding a control center staffed with an air traffic controller and a meteorological officer. The AAIB report said the amended rules still left gaps, including no DGCA oversight of that center and no recording of its radio calls.

Whether the Joshimath crash fits that pattern will depend on what investigators find. For now the confirmed facts are the route, the six deaths and the grounding of Trans Bharat’s fleet.