Vintage propeller plane crashes in Alps; 20 dead
A vintage propeller plane plunged near-vertically into a Swiss mountain, killing all 20 people on board as they returned from a two-day trip to southern Switzerland, investigators said Sunday.
The Junkers Ju-52 plane, operated by small Swiss company Ju-Air, went down Saturday on the Piz Segnas mountain above the Alpine resort of Flims in the country’s southeast, at an altitude of about 8,330 feet above sea level.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash, and officials said they expect a complex investigation given that the 79-yearold plane was not equipped with black boxes.
Police said Sunday they had determined that the 17 passengers and three crew members on board the plane all died.
The victims were 11 men and nine women between the ages of 42 and 84 — seven couples from various parts of Switzerland, a couple from neighboring Austria and their son, and the three crew members. Their names were not released.
The fully booked plane was flying the passengers back to its base at Duebendorf, near Zurich, from a two-day trip to Switzerland’s Italian-speaking southern Ticino region. It crashed shortly before 5 p.m. Saturday, less than 50 minutes after taking off from Locarno’s Magadino airfield.
Photos released by Graubuenden canton (state) police showed the crumpled wreckage of the plane lying on the mountain, with only the upside-down tail more or less intact.
Police said they were not aware of any distress call from the aircraft before it crashed.
“We can assume that the aircraft hit the ground near-vertically and at relatively high speed,” Daniel Knecht of the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board said at a news conference in Flims.
Officials can essentially rule out a collision with another aircraft or an obstacle such as a wire, Knecht said. There also was no indication of any “external influence,” he said, indicating that authorities don’t suspect foul play.
Knecht also dismissed the idea that the plane’s age was necessarily a problem.
“Older planes, if they are correctly maintained, can be operated safely,” he said.
Nearly 5,000 Ju-52 planes, a product of Germany’s Junkers, were manufactured between 1932 and 1952.
Ju-Air’s Ju-52 planes are former Swiss military aircraft, built in 1939, that were retired by the air force in 1981.
Ju-Air started operating flights with the old-timers in 1983. Chief executive and co-founder Kurt Waldmeier said the plane that crashed had logged 10,187 hours of flying time, adding that it underwent maintenance after every 35 hours of flight — most recently at the end of July.
A powerful earthquake struck the Indonesian tourist island of Lombok on Sunday, killing at least 39 people and shaking neighboring Bali, one week after another quake on Lombok killed more than a dozen.
The latest quake, which triggered a brief tsunami warning, damaged buildings as far away as Denpasar on Bali, including a department store and the airport terminal, where ceiling panels were shaken loose, authorities said.
Video showed screaming people running in panic from houses in a Bali neighborhood and vehicles rocking. On Lombok, soldiers and other rescuers carried injured people on stretchers and carpets to an evacuation center.
Muhammad Rum, head of the disaster management agency in West Nusa Tenggara province, which includes Lombok, told Indonesian TV the death toll had risen to 39. Earlier, officials had said at least three people had died.
The quake, recorded at magnitude 7.0 by the U.S. Geological Survey, struck early Sunday evening at a depth of 6 miles in the northern part of Lombok.
“I was watching TV when I felt a big shake,” said Harian, a Lombok woman who uses one name. “The lamp was shaking and people were shouting ‘Get out.’ I ran out into the dark because the power cut off.”
A tsunami warning was lifted after waves just 6 inches high were recorded in three villages, said the head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, Dwikorita Karnawati.
National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the quake was felt strongly across Lombok and Bali and had damaged houses on both islands.
Iwan Asmara, a Lombok disaster official, said frightened people poured out of their homes to move to higher ground, particularly in North Lombok and Mataram, the capital of West Nusa Tenggara province.
The Bali and Lombok airports continued operating Sunday night, according to the director general of civil aviation. There had been a half hour evacuation at the Lombok airport following the quake because the electricity went off.