JAKARTA: A crew member of a helicopter battling Indonesian wildfires was killed on Sunday when the aircraft crashed into a river while scooping up water for an airborne drop, a local disaster agency said.
The crash in Borneo'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, told AFP earlier on Sunday. Further details of their condition were not immediately available.
Dramatic video footage showed the firefighting helicopter being slowly dragged downwards after filling its bucket in the Barito River, eventually plunging nose-first into the water.
