20 dead in WW 2 vintage plane crash
FLIMS, SWITZERLAND: Twenty people died when a vintage World War 2 aircraft crashed into a Swiss mountain at the weekend, police said Sunday.
“The police have the sad certainty that the 20 people aboard perished,” police spokeswoman Anita Senti told a news conference.
There were 11 men and nine women aboard, she said.
The German-built Junker JU52 HB-HOT aircraft, dating from 1939 and nicknamed “Iron Annie”, was a collectors’ aircraft.
It crashed into Piz Segnas, a 3,000-metre peak in the east of the country, on Saturday at an altitude of 2,540 metres on the mountain’s western flank, Senti said.
According to German-language newspaper Blick, the flight had taken off from Ticino in the south of the country and had been due to land at the Duebendorf military airfield near Zurich on Saturday afternoon.
Swiss reports said the passengers were returning from Locarno, a holiday spot in southern Switzerland on Lake Maggiore.
The 20 Minutes newspaper quoted a witness as saying, “The plane turned 180 degrees to the south and fell to the ground like a stone.”
Grisons canton chief of police Andreas Tobler said there was “no longer any hope of finding anyone alive”.An investigation has been launched into the cause of the accident.
As this kind of collectors’ aircraft is not equipped with “black box” flight data and voice recorders, investigators must rely on eyewitness accounts and analysis of debris.
The aircraft belongs to JU-Air, a company with links to the Swiss air force, the ATS news agency reported.
JU-Air said on its website that it was “deeply saddened” and its “thoughts were with the passengers, the crew and families and friends of the victims”.
JU-Air says it runs a small fleet of four Junker planes, all built in 1939, which are for hire. Its pilots are ex-military and professional pilots, all volunteers.
The Junker JU52 is made of corrugated steel and was built by the German firm Junkers from the 1930s to 1950s. It was used as a military transport plane as well as a bomber during World War 2.
In another Swiss plane crash on Saturday, a tourist plane carrying a couple and two children crashed in a forest in the Nidwald canton. No survivors have been found.