Hero crew die in fireball
IT WAS with little room for error that three heroic American firefighters had been flying up to eight firebombing missions a day before their C-130 Hercules crashed in a fireball yesterday.
The highly skilled crew had battled hot, turbulent winds as they manoeuvred the massive air tanker full of 15,000 litres of water and fire retardant just a few hundred feet off the ground to protect lives, wildlife and homes.
Remembered yesterday among the devastated tightknit firefighting family as a “remarkable, well-respected crew”, they had dumped over two million litres of water and fire retardant on the country’s ceaseless summer bushfires since arriving on November 5.
They had flown more than 130 missions since December 1.
The tragedy came as Canberra Airport was in limited operation due to low visibility from fires and smoke, and the return of temperatures into the 40s resulted in seven bushfires being elevated to emergency warning level across NSW and the ACT.
The air tanker called Zeus was fighting two emergency level fires in the Snowy Monaro region after taking off from RAAF Richmond at 12.05pm, when it lost contact with ground crews about 1.45pm, 16 minutes before it was due to land.
The wreckage of the aircraft was found by defence force and RFS helicopters close to Peak View, northeast of Cooma. The impact was so forceful it created a fireball on impact and emergency services could only find the tail of the aircraft still intact.
The local fire brigade called in a code red when they saw the crash. “Fire comms, message red. Peak View, message red. Crashed – over,” they said over the radio. “Yeah fire comms. It’s just a ball of flames – over.”
Sue Millner was at the RFS Station when she heard the call over the radio.
“He said he saw the crash and sound panicked,” she said. “Then he asked to be called on his mobile so I knew it must have been something bad.”
The crew was with the privately owned North American company, Coulson Aviation, which has been working with the RFS for the past five years.
“They’re absolute professionals,” Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said.
“The fire fighting fraternity is a tight-knit family, a fairly small family and the crew on board were well known, not just to their colleagues here in Australia, but we’re reminded that a number of our US colleagues who are embedded with the incident management teams actually had personal relationships with them.”
A response team from Coulson Aviation was last night on its way to Australia.
The Australian Transport Safety Board announced an investigation into the tragedy and said a preliminary report would be released in about 30 days.