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An aircraft engineer was killed when a helicopter hovering at the site of a prior crash lost control and hit him.
Iván Andrés López Londoño, the head of maintenance at Colombia‘s Helifly company, was killed in the Serranía del Pinche mountains in the country’s south-west, the firm said.
Video showed the second helicopter hovering tentatively over the wreckage of the previously downed craft as a man climbs towards it, and another person waves nearby.
Suddenly the helicopter lurches diagonally over to starboard, crashing into him and then the ground.
Other company personnel at the crash site were unharmed, Helifly said. Staff were carrying out technical work there, it added.
Colonel Fabio Rojas, police chief for the Cauca region where the crash took place, told Colombian newspaper El Tiempo: “What we know is that the [first] helicopter suffered a mechanical fault, and another aircraft was sent to transfer its cargo and also sustained mechanical failures that caused it to fall to the ground”.
Following the crash on 15 April Helifly said in a statement that its staff were “profoundly saddened” by Mr López Londoño’s death, and that his family was being kept up to date on “every detail” of the investigation.
The “competent authorities” were probing the circumstances of the crash, Helifly added.
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