The aircraft was airborne for eight minutes. An Eastindo Air helicopter lost contact with air traffic control shortly after departing Kotabaru district airport in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan province on Monday, bound for Palangkaraya, the capital of neighboring Central Kalimantan. On board were two crew members and six passengers, three of them foreign nationals. Contact never returned, and what followed was a three-day search across Borneo’s tropical forest before the wreckage surfaced.
According to officials, the National Search and Rescue Agency located the wreck in jungle terrain on Wednesday evening, and rescuers pulled one body, presumed to belong to the crash, at about 3:50 in the afternoon local time, found some 100 meters from the wreck. Yudhi Bramantyo, operations director at the agency known as BASARNAS, briefing reporters in Banjarbaru, South Kalimantan’s capital, said the operation continued and that teams assumed the others aboard were still inside the fuselage.
The hunt that preceded the find was large. The deployment was large: police and soldiers worked alongside local agency staff, residents and volunteers, more than 200 people in all, assigned by land and air to a forest block near Mantewe, in Tanahbumbu district, spanning some 10 square miles, while five helicopters rotated through sweeps until bad weather interfered. Worsening conditions and limited daylight complicated the work, officials said, with ground teams redirected to the site once the wreckage was confirmed.
The aircraft, an Airbus BK117 D-3, came down burnt. Bramantyo put it plainly: “The condition of the helicopter is clearly burnt, so it will be necessary to dismantle the aircraft to confirm the number of victims inside.” The site sits around 700 metres from the reference point set by Indonesia’s transport safety committee, and a salvage operation is expected before the remaining seven people on the manifest can be accounted for.
For Indonesia, the crash lands on familiar ground. The country has been plagued by transport accidents in recent years, from plane crashes to ferry sinkings. Last July, a tourist helicopter in Bali, a Bell 505 Jet Ranger X operated by PT Whitesky Aviation, fell at Pecatu village after snaring a kite string; two Australians and three Indonesians on board survived. Analysts note the pattern keeps pressure on Indonesian aviation oversight; for now, the immediate task in South Kalimantan is recovery, and the accounting of eight people who left Kotabaru on schedule.
Sources
- Wreckage of missing helicopter found in Indonesia-Xinhua
- Helicopter crashes just 8 minutes after take off as seven people still missing – The Mirror
