Andhra Chief Minister YS Reddy's case is, of course, not the first high profile chopper accident in the country.
But while some have been tragic, others have seen miraculous escapes.
Reddy was in a Bell 430 helicopter that went missing on Wednesday morning.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has confirmed that the helicopter did have a valid certificate of airworthiness despite an entry in its own website that the helicopter did not have this certificate for a period of two years.
Aviation authorities point out that ahead of every flight, the helicopter needs to be checked and certified by a qualified flight engineer and there is no way this would have been skipped in the case of a VIP flight.
The Bell helicopter was sold to the Andhra government in 1998.
It is a twin-engine helicopter fully equipped to fly in poor weather conditions.
The Helicopter is equipped with a Emergency Landing Transmitter (ELT), which sends out signals in case of a hard landing or crash.
These signals, which are encoded to be picked up by ISRO satellites, have not been received.
What remains clear is that the helicopter was cleared for a flight in poor weather conditions, so severe that even some search helicopters of the Indian Air Force were initially forced to abandon their operations.
This is not the first time that VIPs have been involved in helicopter crashes in the country.
On September 30, 2001
Madhav Rao Scindia, the senior Congress leader was killed along with six others when the private plane he was in went down near Mainpuri in UP.
On 3 March 3, 2002
Lok Sabha speaker GMC Balayogi was killed in a helicopter crash.
On July 28, 2003
Dr Vijay Mallya, UB group chairman and Rajya Sabha MP survived this helicopter crash with sixpeople on board.
On March 31, 2005
OP Jindal, the Minister of Power in the Government of Haryana was killed when his helicopter went down near Saharanpur.
It's still too early to say what happened to YSR Reddy, but the increasing number of helicopter incidents in the country, not all of them are crashes, will clearly have the directorate general of civil aviation worried.
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