Crash of Indonesian water-bombing helicopter kills crew member
Duration: 1:44 Views: 334 Submitted: 2 hours ago Submitted by:
A crew member of a helicopter battling Indonesian wildfires was killed on Nov 8 when the aircraft crashed into a river as it scooped up water for an airborne drop, a local disaster agency said.
The crash in Borneo Island’s South Kalimantan province was the second in days involving a firefighting aircraft, after a military helicopter plunged into the waters off Borneo on Nov 4, killing three people.
Two Australian pilots survived the crash on Nov 8 and were “safe”, Berton Panjaitan, a spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency, told AFP earlier on Nov 8. Further details of their condition were not immediately available.
Dramatic footage showed the firefighting helicopter slowly dragged downward after filling its bucket in the Barito River, eventually plunging nose-first into the water.
“A joint search and rescue team recovered the final victim at 6.08pm local time during a diving operation involving four divers,” a statement released by the search and rescue office in the provincial capital Banjarmasin on the evening of Nov 8 said.
The South-east Asian archipelago has been struggling for months to control blazes that have burned through large swathes of Sumatra, Borneo and Papua islands, causing choking haze that drifted to neighbouring Malaysia, East Timor and Singapore.
The crash in Borneo Island’s South Kalimantan province was the second in days involving a firefighting aircraft, after a military helicopter plunged into the waters off Borneo on Nov 4, killing three people.
Two Australian pilots survived the crash on Nov 8 and were “safe”, Berton Panjaitan, a spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency, told AFP earlier on Nov 8. Further details of their condition were not immediately available.
Dramatic footage showed the firefighting helicopter slowly dragged downward after filling its bucket in the Barito River, eventually plunging nose-first into the water.
“A joint search and rescue team recovered the final victim at 6.08pm local time during a diving operation involving four divers,” a statement released by the search and rescue office in the provincial capital Banjarmasin on the evening of Nov 8 said.
The South-east Asian archipelago has been struggling for months to control blazes that have burned through large swathes of Sumatra, Borneo and Papua islands, causing choking haze that drifted to neighbouring Malaysia, East Timor and Singapore.
Categories: Accident
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