Indonesian crew member dies as firefighting helicopter crashes into Barito River

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A helicopter scooping water to fight forest fires in Indonesian Borneo crashed into the Barito River on Sunday, November 8, killing one of the three people on board. The aircraft, a Eurocopter EC225LP Super Puma registered VH-HGM, went down near Tabatan village in Barito Kuala regency, South Kalimantan, while collecting water for a water-bombing run.

The man who died was Yayan Supyansuri, an Indonesian national who served as the helicopter's landing officer. Search teams recovered his body from the river at about 6:08 p.m. local time, ending a search that ran through the afternoon. The two other crew members, Australian Michael John Betteridge and New Zealander Hugh Andrew John Page, were pulled from the water alive and taken to an Indonesian Air Force hospital, where disaster officials said they were in good health.

The Super Puma belonged to a private company working under contract to Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency, BNPB, and was part of the aerial effort against forest and land fires burning across Kalimantan. Disaster officials said it crashed at about 11:58 a.m. while filling its bucket from the river. Video of the accident showed the helicopter hovering low over the water before tipping forward and plunging in nose-first.

Indonesia's disaster agency and the national search and rescue agency both confirmed the death, the names of the three crew members, and the place and time of the crash, and their accounts agree on the sequence of events. Early updates from the disaster agency said all three crew members had survived and described both survivors as Australian; the agency later corrected both points, confirming that Yayan remained missing before his body was found and that one survivor is Australian and the other a New Zealander. Reports differ on the spelling of the Australian survivor's surname. No cause has been announced, and police said they would work with the National Transportation Safety Committee and aviation authorities to establish what happened.

The crash was the second in less than a week involving a helicopter fighting fires on Borneo. On November 4, an army Mi-17 helicopter went down in Central Kalimantan during a similar water-loading mission, killing three soldiers.

No cause for the crash has been announced, and the national transport safety committee is investigating. The two survivors were taken to an Indonesian Air Force hospital, where disaster officials said they were in good health.