There were jubilation and celebration as UPDF heaped praises on its engineers from the Airforce who managed to fix the Force’s helicopter gunship which made an emergency landing in Fort Portal on Saturday morning.
“Our MI 24 attack helicopter that had made an emergency landing in Fort Portal has been recovered. Thanks to our team of technicians from Air Force,” the UPDF spokesperson Brig Felix Kulayigye tweeted on Wednesday night.
The chopper had two soldiers on board crashed landed near Saaka Airfield in Fort Portal City, Kabarole District in western Uganda.
The helicopter landed into a mud and wattle house at 9:30am, just half a kilometer from the airfield.
Three helicopters had just taken off from Saaka airfield but one of them crash-landed on one of the houses belonging to an elderly woman in the neighbourhood.
She was rushed to hospital.
The attack helicopter was heading to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where the UPDF is currently fighting the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels in a joint operation with the Congolese army.
On Monday the UPDF engineers managed to remove the helicopter from the scene where it crashed and took it to Ssaka Airfield to verify the damage after make an assessment.
UPDF announced the affected people would be compensated.
The old woman Peruth Kabarwani whose house had been destroyed, was relocated and the army pledged to reconstruct her house.
On Wednesday evening, the chopper took to the skies again.
