Two helicopters fighting a wildfire west of Athens collided in mid-air on Sunday. Al Jazeera reported that "two crew members died in the crash, while the other two survived."
That is the whole of what we can confirm.
What we do not know
The aircraft types, and whether they were state, military or contracted. How many people were aboard each helicopter, beyond the four accounted for. The names of the dead, which have not been released by any authority we could reach. The condition of the two survivors.
We also do not know which fire they were working, how large it is, whether anyone on the ground was evacuated, or what caused the collision.
Why the story is this short
We could reach exactly one source.
Our usual practice is to hold a story until we can check it against a second independent account, and on a fatal accident that practice matters more than usual, because casualty figures in aviation crashes are among the most frequently corrected numbers in journalism.
We are publishing anyway, with a single attribution stated plainly in the first sentence, because two people died doing this work and the fact of it is worth recording even when the detail is not yet available. What we are not doing is dressing four facts up as a full account.
Aerial firefighting is flown low, in turbulent air, in poor visibility, by multiple aircraft working the same ground at the same time. Los Angeles County and Cal Fire fly these missions over this state every summer.
We will update this when a second source is reachable.
