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Two firefighting helicopter pilots, a Danish national and a Greek citizen, were killed Sunday when their aircraft collided in midair over the Psatha area west of Athens, as hundreds of firefighters battled a wave of wildfires burning across Greece under gale-force winds.
The two men were taken unconscious to hospital following the collision, where they were later pronounced dead, the fire department's director of communications, Vassilis Vathrakogiannis, said in a televised address.
The crew of the second helicopter involved was rescued. The collision, captured on television footage showing one aircraft striking the underbelly of the other before erupting in flames and plummeting to the ground, brought the total death toll from this week's Greek fires to five, following the earlier deaths of three firefighters in Crete and the Peloponnese.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis identified the dead as a Dane and a Greek, and had earlier warned the country was facing "extremely difficult" days ahead.
The two aircraft were Bell-type helicopters leased from McDermott Aviation, an Australian company that has deployed a fleet of 15 Bell 214-series heavy-lift helicopters to Greece for the 2026 fire season, marking its seventh consecutive year supporting Greek firefighting authorities. The helicopters had taken off from Elefsina military airport west of Athens before the collision.
Following the accident, fire authorities grounded all Bell helicopters operating in the area pending an investigation, state broadcaster ERT reported.
Officials had warned for several days that violent winds, which reached 100 kilometers per hour according to Mitsotakis, made aerial firefighting operations extremely hazardous. Most aircraft had been sidelined until Sunday, when conditions allowed a brief window for deployment.
"When the winds blow with such force, even the dozens of aircraft we have at our disposal cannot operate safely," Mitsotakis wrote on Facebook.
Gale-force winds created conditions in which aircraft "either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence," Civil Protection Minister Evangelos Tournas said Saturday, adding that the fire department had been "pushed to its limits."
Vathrakogiannis said 220 forest and agricultural fires had broken out across the country since Monday, calling the current period "perhaps the most difficult days of the summer."
Until this week, Greece had been relatively spared from heat waves and major fires this summer, in contrast to France and Spain.
The fires have carved through tens of thousands of hectares of land. Around the Porto Germeno coastal village on the Gulf of Corinth, where a fire apparently sparked by a power cable on Friday swept through the area, early estimates from the National Observatory's climate tracker meteo.gr put the burned area at more than 6,500 hectares.
Wildfire meteorologist Theodore Giannaros, a senior researcher at the National Observatory, said the actual figure appeared to exceed 10,000 hectares, writing on Facebook that the blaze would likely be classified as a "megafire." Earlier in the week, fires on the islands of Crete and Paros burned through an additional 6,000 hectares, according to meteo.gr.
Porto Germeno and surrounding villages were evacuated when the blaze broke out Friday, with local authorities reporting scores of homes damaged or destroyed. Municipal crews and volunteers spent Sunday rescuing dozens of dogs and leaving food for cats that had been left behind.
"We could not believe what we were seeing, the fire spread extremely rapidly," said Nikos Georgopoulos from the laboratory of forest management at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Two men working for an electricity company were arrested in connection with the Porto Germeno fire. On the Ionian island of Cephalonia, a 44-year-old man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of deliberately starting a separate fire, according to the Greek news agency ANA.
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