Two Firefighting Helicopters Collided in Midair Over a Greek Wildfire. A Bystander Caught It on Video.
A Greek coordinator and a Danish pilot were killed when two Bell helicopters struck each other above the Psatha fire west of Athens. Two other crew members were pulled out alive.
Two firefighting crew members were killed on Sunday when the helicopters they were flying collided in midair above a wind-driven wildfire west of Athens, and a bystander's video of the crash spread across Greek television within hours.
The two Bell helicopters were working the Psatha area of the Boeotia region, roughly 45 miles northwest of Athens, when they struck each other. Footage taken from the ground shows the aircraft flying close together over a scrubby hillside before one clips the underbelly of the other, explodes and drops into the terrain below. Each aircraft carried a two-person crew. A Greek coordinator and a Danish pilot aboard one helicopter were killed. The two crew members in the second aircraft, a Greek national and a British national, were recovered alive.
"The loss of the Greek coordinator and the Danish pilot while they were operating in the major fire at Porto Germeno fills us all with grief," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said.
The helicopters had flown out of Elefsina Air Base to attack two fires that ignited Saturday morning and then ran hard in strong wind gusts. About 450 firefighters were committed across the two fire zones. More than a hundred homes have been destroyed in the Greek blazes and evacuation orders have moved residents out of several communities near the coast west of the capital. Aerial units returned to the fire on Monday, resuming water drops over the same ground where the collision happened.
The deaths came days after three firefighters were killed in a single day battling Greek wildfires, pushing the country's toll for the season into territory the fire service has not seen in years. Greece runs one of Europe's largest aerial firefighting operations, leaning heavily on contracted helicopters and Canadair water bombers, and the aircraft often work in tight, smoke-filled airspace where several machines queue for the same drop line.
The Greek fires are one front in a wildfire emergency that has stretched across southern Europe this summer. In France, the Gironde fire has destroyed more than 240 homes and forced roughly 300,000 people to evacuate, with the blaze changing direction over the weekend and forcing crews to reset their lines. Spain is fighting major fires of its own. Italy issued red heat alerts for a record 25 cities as its fourth heat wave of the summer settled over the peninsula, and Hungary shut down its only nuclear plant because the Danube ran too low and too warm to cool the reactors.
European fire agencies say the burned acreage across the continent is running at roughly triple the seasonal norm. Scientists attribute the conditions — record heat stacked on months of little rain — to a warming climate that dries fuels earlier and keeps them combustible later into the year.
Originally reported by ABC News.