DEHRADUN — All six people aboard a chartered helicopter flying from the Badrinath shrine to Dehradun were killed when the aircraft came down on a Himalayan slope near Joshimath on Friday afternoon, officials in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district said.

The helicopter, operated by Trans Bharat Aviation Pvt. Ltd. and bearing the call sign VT-HCX, left the Badrinath civil helipad for the Sahastradhara helipad in Dehradun at about 1.12 p.m., Chamoli Superintendent of Police Surjeet Singh Panwar said. Its transmission link with radar was lost near Joshimath at 1.14 p.m.

Official accounts of the timing do not agree. The Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority said in a statement that the flight left at about 1.15 p.m. and went missing around 2.20 p.m. PTI reported that officials placed the crash near the JP Power House, close to Marwari Bridge, at about that hour.

The crash has revived questions about who decides when the single-engine machines that shuttle pilgrims across the Garhwal Himalaya may fly. Trans Bharat Aviation's entire fleet has been grounded as a precaution, officials said.

The dead were named as the pilot, Captain Himanshu Sabharwal, a resident of Delhi, and five passengers from Karnataka: Prathap, Arun Salunke, Shankaregowda, Sudheer K and H.S. Nataraj. Officials said there were no women or children on board.

Salunke was an inspector with the Bengaluru police Central Crime Branch, a 2007-batch officer who had served in Nelamangala, Kunigal and Banaswadi, according to accounts given to ANI. A relative said Friday was the third day of the trip and the day the group had been due home.

Shankaregowda had flown to Dehradun with friends four days earlier and often travelled with Salunke. A neighbour in Tumakuru said he came from Huliyurdurga in Kunigal and worked as a lawyer.

Soldiers at a nearby army post saw the helicopter drop into the valley about a kilometre above the Bhandakand temple near Pandukeshwar, Panwar said. Garhwal Divisional Commissioner Anand Swaroop said the chartered flight lost contact near Marwari, above Joshimath, at around 2 p.m.

The first word of a crash reached the administration at 2.21 p.m., when the sub-divisional magistrate at Joshimath reported a possible crash landing above Chai village. Officials then saw smoke near the settlement and sent a team. An army party was first to the site, at about 3.30 p.m., Prateek Jain, the chief executive of UCADA, told ANI.

The wreckage lay high on the flank of Hathi Parvat, above the village, on ground that was hard to reach. Chamoli Additional District Magistrate Vivek Prakash said recovery teams were bringing the bodies down to Joshimath. Police, the State Disaster Response Force, the army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police took part.

Snow was falling as the helicopter lost contact, Deccan Herald reported. The India Meteorological Department had placed five districts, Chamoli among them, under an orange alert for heavy to very heavy rain and snow on Friday. Anoop Nautiyal, a Dehradun-based activist who tracks the state's disaster management, said that warning had reached officials well before the flight left.

Nautiyal said a press note issued at 5.44 p.m. the previous evening, after a meeting chaired by Disaster Management Secretary Vinod Kumar Suman, told officials to stay alert and to move passengers to safety if conditions worsened. The Chief Minister's Office sent a further message at 8.01 a.m. on Friday telling authorities to control the movement of tourists at high altitude, he said.

"Despite these warnings, helicopter sorties reportedly continued. This raises questions about who authorised the flights, whether the Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority (UCADA) enforced the necessary restrictions and why commercial operations were allowed to continue under potentially unsafe conditions," he said.

Jain rejected the criticism and said UCADA was following all prescribed safety norms. "At the time the helicopter crashed, the weather was clear. Two sorties took off before it and two after it, and all of them landed safely," he said, adding that a detailed investigation was under way.

Uttarakhand's helicopter record has been under scrutiny since the 2025 pilgrimage season. Six people died in a crash between Kharsali and Jhala that May, and seven in an Aryan Aviation crash near Gaurikund the following month. Among the factors behind the June accident, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau listed cloud that dropped quickly, a loss of visual reference, the choice to carry on along the route and the pilot's thin experience of the Kedarnath valley.

Of 12 helicopter accidents recorded in India since 2020, more than half happened in Uttarakhand, and the state accounted for 21 of the 30 deaths, the Civil Aviation Ministry told Parliament in July 2025. The Hindu reported that more than a dozen companies fly about 30 single-engine helicopters in the state each season, worth an estimated 800 crore rupees a year.

Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami ordered officials to examine every aspect of the accident and told the Chamoli administration to help the families. Harish Rawat, a former chief minister and Congress leader, said air services in the state had to be made safe as well as competitive.

Karnataka Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, Deputy Chief Minister G. Parameshwara and former chief minister Siddaramaiah all offered condolences. The Karnataka government said in a press note that all six bodies had been recovered and that its relief commissioner was working with Uttarakhand to bring the remains home.

Prakash said post-mortem examinations would be carried out at Joshimath on Saturday.