JAKARTA: A crew member of a helicopter battling Indonesian wildfires was killed 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 Wednesday, killing three people.
Two Australian pilots survived Sunday's crash and were "safe", Berton Panjaitan, a spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency, said. Further details of their condition were not immediately available.
Dramatic video footage showed the firefighting helicopter being 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 6:08 pm local time during a diving operation involving four divers," a statement released by the search and rescue office in provincial capital Banjarmasin on Sunday evening said.
The Southeast Asian archipelago has been struggling for months to control blazes that have burned through large swaths of Sumatra, Borneo and Papua islands, causing choking haze that drifted to neighbouring Malaysia, East Timor and Singapore. — AFP
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