Two pilots and all six passengers were killed when a private helicopter crashed on Indonesia’s Borneo Island, the country’s transport ministry said today.
Contact between the helicopter –built by Airbus, owned by local company Matthew Air Nusantara– and air traffic controllers was lost five minutes after it took off from West Kalimantan province yesterday Thursday morning.
It was carrying eight men, including a Malaysian national, said Civil Aviation Authority director general Lukman F. Laissea.
At present,no explanation has been given for the cause of the disaster. “All the passengers and crew members passed away, based on our information from the field,” he said.
Rescue crews located the victims last night in an area covered by dense forest with steep slopes, a search and rescue agency official said.
Indonesia, a vast southeast Asian archipelago, relies heavily on air transport to connect its thousands of islands. But the country does not get a particularly good grade in air transport safety: several fatal accidents have occurred in recent years.
In January, an aircraft chartered by the Ministry of Fisheries crashed in a mountainous area, killing all ten people on board. In September 2025, a helicopter that was also carrying six passengers and had two pilots crashed in South Kalimantan province. No one survived.
