All six people aboard a helicopter flying from the Himalayan pilgrimage town of Badrinath to Dehradun are dead, police in Uttarakhand confirmed on Friday evening. The bodies of the pilot and five passengers have been recovered from the crash site near Joshimath, ending hours of uncertainty in which rescue teams raced into steep, snow-dusted terrain not knowing whether anyone had survived.
Chamoli district’s police chief, Surjit Singh Panwar, confirmed the deaths after joint teams from the Uttarakhand Police, the State Disaster Response Force and the Indian Army reached the wreckage. The helicopter, operated by Trans Bharat Aviation and bearing the call sign VT-HCX, had been carrying five passengers and a pilot when it went down near Chai village, close to Joshimath in Chamoli district.
The aircraft had taken off from the Badrinath Civil Helipad at about 1:14 p.m. local time, bound for Sahastradhara Helipad in Dehradun, the state capital. Within about two minutes, contact was lost. The Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority (UCDA), the state body that oversees civil aviation in Uttarakhand, said in a statement: “The helicopter lost communication when it was flying over Joshimath valley.” At the same time, its tracking system stopped showing the aircraft’s position.
The wreckage was later found on a hillside near the JP Power House, close to Marwari Bridge, at around 2:20 p.m., according to officials cited in local reports. Given the difficult terrain and limited road access, teams were still working on Friday evening to carry the six bodies to a point reachable by road.
Police identified the pilot as Captain Himanshu Sabharwal, a resident of Delhi. The five passengers — Prathapa, Arun, Shankar Gowda, Sudheer K. and H.S. Natraja — were all from the southern state of Karnataka. All six people on board were men. Officials have not yet released further details about the passengers’ journey, beyond that they had been travelling from Badrinath, one of Hinduism’s most revered shrines, high in the Garhwal Himalayas.
As a precaution, the UCDA grounded the entire fleet of Trans Bharat Aviation following the crash. The exact cause has not been established. Television channels reporting from the scene said bad weather was suspected, and the helicopter was reported to have taken off amid snowfall, but investigators have not confirmed what brought the aircraft down, and officials have cautioned against drawing conclusions before the wreckage is examined.
Uttarakhand’s chief minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, had earlier confirmed the crash and said a joint rescue operation involving the district administration, disaster management teams and troops was under way. He said he was monitoring the operation and had ordered that any seriously injured people be airlifted for treatment — instructions issued while rescuers still hoped to find survivors.
The crash is the latest deadly accident on the mountain helicopter routes that serve India’s Himalayan pilgrimage circuit, where short hops between high-altitude shrines and valley towns are routine but unforgiving. In June 2025, seven people died when a helicopter carrying pilgrims crashed near Kedarnath, another major shrine in the same state. Each accident has renewed questions about flying in thin mountain air, sudden weather changes and the pressure of pilgrimage-season schedules — questions that investigators will now face again over Joshimath. Helicopter crashes in difficult terrain have also made headlines elsewhere this month, including a Saudi military helicopter crash near the Yemen border that killed two crew members.
For the families in Karnataka, hundreds of kilometres from the crash site, the confirmation brings a grim end to a day that began as a pilgrimage journey and ended in a mountainside recovery operation. For Uttarakhand, which depends heavily on pilgrimage tourism, it is another reminder of how quickly a routine flight in the Himalayas can turn fatal — and why the investigation into what happened in the two minutes after take-off matters well beyond one valley.
