"Two firefighting helicopters have collided in midair while battling a wind-driven wildfire near the Greek capital, sending one aircraft crashing to the ground and killing two people," Al Jazeera reported on Sunday [1]. The collision happened in the Psatha area, west of Athens [1].
Four people were in the air. Both crew aboard the helicopter that came down, a Greek national and a Danish national, were killed. The two aboard the second helicopter, a British national and a Greek national, were rescued alive [1]. None of the four has been named in the reporting available.
The cause has not been established. Investigations were under way at the time of the report, which does not give the exact time of the collision, the helicopter types, the operators of either aircraft, or the weather at the moment of impact [1]. Those details determine who investigates and under which rules, which is a reason to leave them blank rather than fill them in.
The two aircraft were working one fire inside a much larger emergency. Fires in Greece have destroyed more than a hundred homes and forced evacuations across the country, with more than 10,000 hectares likely destroyed so far [1]. Nearly 500 firefighters have been deployed, and reinforcements have arrived from France and Romania [1].
Nearly 500 firefighters spread across a country in a fire season means the fire in front of any particular village is often being fought by the people who live there. Tasos Tzempelikov, 61, a resident of Agios Konstantinos, was pouring water on the fire alongside his son when he described the position: "The fire has been burning since last night; it is certain that they cannot have forces everywhere. We as residents are doing everything we can" [1].
Aerial firefighting is the answer to that shortfall, and it carries its own arithmetic of risk. Crews fly low over terrain that generates its own wind, in smoke, with more than one aircraft working the same airspace above the same fire. A midair collision is the failure mode that arrangement produces. What made this one happen is for the investigation to establish, and no investigating authority is named in the reporting available [1].
Two of the people the state sends when a fire outruns everyone on the ground did not come back on Sunday. A man in Agios Konstantinos was still throwing water at a fire that had been burning since the night before. Both of those things were happening in the same set of hills on the same afternoon, and the second is why the first was in the air.
