A helicopter travelling between palm oil plantations in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan crashed on Thursday, killing all eight people on board, authorities confirmed on Friday. The Airbus H130, operated by local firm Matthew Air Nusantara, took off from Melawi district at 8:34 a.m. and lost contact with authorities just five minutes into its flight. It was heading to another plantation in Kubu Raya district when contact was lost.
Security forces and rescue teams launched a joint search operation after the aircraft disappeared. An aerial search identified debris in a dense forest with rugged, hilly terrain, including fragments believed to be the tail section of the helicopter, found approximately three kilometres west of the point where contact was lost. Around 20 rescuers were deployed on the ground, supported by an Air Force helicopter. By Friday morning, all eight bodies — including two crew members — had been recovered and transported to Pontianak, the provincial capital of West Kalimantan.
West Kalimantan is Indonesia's portion of Borneo, the world's third-largest island, which the country shares with Malaysia and Brunei. The region's interior is characterised by dense tropical forest and difficult terrain, making air travel a common and often essential mode of transport for reaching remote agricultural and industrial sites such as palm oil plantations.
The crash is the latest in a series of fatal aviation accidents in Indonesia, a vast Southeast Asian archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that depends heavily on air transport for connectivity. In September last year, a helicopter carrying eight people crashed shortly after takeoff from South Kalimantan province, killing everyone on board. Less than two weeks later, four people died in a separate helicopter crash in the remote Papua district of Ilaga. In January this year, a turboprop plane chartered by the fisheries ministry struck a mountain on the island of Sulawesi, killing all 10 passengers.
Indonesia has long struggled with aviation safety, and the repeated loss of life in recent incidents has kept the issue in sharp focus. Investigators have yet to announce a cause for Thursday's crash, and an official inquiry is expected to follow.