All 14 passengers survived a close brush with death on Monday when their helicopter crashed in the far east of Russia

All 14 passengers survived a close brush with death on Monday when their helicopter crashed in the far east of Russia.
  
The Mi-8 helicopter, which included 11 forest firefighters among its passengers, crashed near the village of Chekunda in the Khabarovsk region, the Federal Forestry Agency said. "They got in touch and said they were alive," a spokeswoman for the agency, Yulia Vasyutinskaya, told AFP. She did not provide further details.
  
Regional investigators had earlier reported that the helicopter had crashed and burned, and that a team of investigators was heading to the site.

“At 1pm (local time), a Mi-8 helicopter, belonging to the Air aviation company, flew on a firefighting mission to the Verkhnebureinsky area. At 6:57pm (local time) it was spotted from the air to the north-west of the settlement of Chekunda of the Verkhnebureinsky area. The causes of the crash are being investigated, and the number of those injured is being specified,” a spokeswoman for regional prosecutors Oxana Polshanova told ITAR-TASS reported earlier.