RENO, Nev. (AP) -- A firefighting aircraft crashed into rugged terrain near the Utah-Nevada border as it dropped retardant on a 5,000-acre wildfire, killing the two Idaho men on board.
The air tanker went down Sunday afternoon in the Hamblin Valley area of western Utah, Bureau of Land Management officials said.
The two pilots were fighting the fire, which began burning Friday night after a lightning strike in eastern Nevada. The fire spread into Utah on Saturday night, but most of the blaze remained in Nevada, about 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
A helicopter crew saw the crash and told ground crews that "it didn't look good," Iron County sheriff's Detective Sgt. Jody Edwards in Utah told The Salt Lake Tribune.
BLM ground crews and air crew members worked to hold the fire back from the wreckage. Sheriff's deputies drove and hiked for more than an hour to reach the site and confirm that the pilots had died, Edwards said. The fire later overwhelmed the crash site, Edwards said.
The sheriff's office identified the pilots as Todd Neal Tompkins and Ronnie Edwin Chambless, both of Boise, Idaho.
Tompkins and Chambless were flying a P-2V air tanker that is owned by Neptune Aviation Services of Missoula, Mont. A medical examiner was helping authorities recover the bodies Sunday night.
There was no immediate word on what caused the crash.
The fire was burning in steep, rugged terrain featuring pinion-juniper woodlands, sagebrush and grasses. Crews were pulled off the fire lines after the crash.
"To have them working on the fire lines after this is more than we would like to ask firefighters," said Don Smurthwaite, spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. "It's obviously a horrifying and tragic event."
Firefighters didn't expect to have the fire fully contained until Saturday, BLM spokesman Chris Hanefeld said.
Also Sunday afternoon, the crew of another firefighting P-2V air tanker reported it was unable to lower all of its landing gear and land at Minden-Tahoe Airport in western Nevada. That crew had been helping with efforts to fight a wildfire near the airport, which is about 50 miles south of Reno.
Crew members flew the plane for another 90 minutes to burn off fuel before making an emergency landing on a cleared runway, Douglas County sheriff's spokesman Jim Halsey said.
The aircraft sustained significant damage after it slid off the runway, but both crew members escaped injury, he said.
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