FirstAlerts
Plane Crashes

Two Pilots Killed in Helicopter Crash While Responding to Utah's Widemouth 2 Fire

KSL reports the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration were working to reach the crash site near Richfield, Utah, as the cause remained under investigation.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 11, 2026, 8:48 p.m. ET
pilots were killed when a helicopter crashed while responding to the Widemouth Fire near , Utah, according to reporting by KSL. The event is still developing. KSL identified the pilots as Chris Andersen, 64, of Stateline, Nevada, and Miles Elliott, 50, of Porterville, California. The outlet reported fatalities in total. The aircraft has not been identified in the available material, and no registration has been released. The cause of the crash has not been determined. KSL reported that the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration were working to access the crash site and that the cause remained under investigation. The Widemouth Fire is Utah's largest wildfire so far this year, according to KSL, which reported the fire had grown to 122,759 acres at 30% containment and that lightning caused it to start on July 27. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox ordered U.S. and Utah flags flown at half-staff until sunset on the day of the last interment.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Reference data

From aircraft and geographic registries, not from the news sources. Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.

Terrain elevation
846 ft
Nearest aerodrome
3.2 miles W of Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport / Wold–Chamberlain Field (KMSP/MSP)

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 112 Aug 2026, 00:48current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.