A helicopter scooping water out of Indonesia’s Barito River to fight Kalimantan’s wildfires gets pulled down by its own bucket and goes straight into the current. The second clip shows what’s left of it a few minutes later, nose-down in the water with a wooden boat already alongside. Turns out the easy-looking part of this job, dipping a bucket into open water, is the part that goes wrong.
Video 1
The crash, filmed from across the river
Video 2
The wreck, filmed from the rescue boat
The first clip is shot from a boat crossing South Kalimantan’s Barito River, wide and muddy brown under a flat grey sky. A grey helicopter comes in low with a red water bucket swinging on a cable below it, the rig crews use to refill straight from a river when there’s no reservoir close enough. The bucket touches the surface, and instead of lifting back out, the helicopter gets hauled down with it, gone under the brown water within seconds.
The second clip picks up after, filmed from a wooden rescue boat working its way across the same stretch of water. The wreck sits nose-down and tail-up in the current, with a cargo barge drifting past in the distance behind it. The boat eases up alongside and a couple of guys climb straight onto the half-sunk fuselage for a closer look. They seem a lot more curious than careful about it.
What the Thread Said
Most of the thread got technical fast: dunk a bucket into a moving river and the drag turns it into an anchor right when the helicopter needs to climb, and a few people walked through how letting the cable out too deep adds resistance and yanks the tail back before the nose can come up. One reply claimed it was a chartered aircraft and that all 3 crew walked away fine. The odd one out insisted something actually reached up out of the river and grabbed it, because apparently the Loch Ness Monster has a Kalimantan branch now.
Kalimantan’s Firefighting Choppers: Two Crashes in 5 Days
The chopper going down on camera isn’t a one-off, it’s the second firefighting helicopter to crash over Kalimantan in less than a week.
- 2 firefighting helicopters have gone down over Kalimantan in just 5 days, this crash and one before it
- 3 soldiers died on November 4 when an army Mi-17V5 crashed near Tanjung Puting park while fighting a forest fire
- That crash came just 4 days before the one in this video
- BNPB (Indonesia’s disaster agency) is now checking maintenance records, crew licensing, weather data and flight procedures on both crashes
- Low-altitude water scooping is flagged as high risk since the sudden weight change on pickup hits engine power and climb performance directly
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