20 dead in WW-II vintage plane crash
Geneva, August 5
Twenty persons died after a vintage World War II aircraft crashed into a Swiss mountainside at the weekend, police said today.
“The police have the sad certainty that the 20 persons aboard perished,” police spokeswoman Anita Senti told a news conference.
There were 11 men and nine women aboard, including an Austrian couple and their son, she said.
The Junker JU52 HB-HOT aircraft, built in Germany in 1939 and now a collectors’ item, crashed into Piz Segnas, a 3,000-metre peak in the east of the country on Saturday. The crash occurred at 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. The 20 Minutes newspaper quoted a witness who was on the mountainside at the time of the crash.
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 of them volunteers. — AFP
