WWII plane crash in Switzerland kills all 20 on board

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Swiss investigators are trying to determine what caused the country’s worst air crash in years.‍

A vintage World War II plane plunged into a mountain in eastern Switzerland on Saturday, killing all 20 people on board, police said Sunday.

"The police have the sad certainty that the 20 people aboard perished," police spokeswoman Anita Senti told a news conference.

The plane, a German-built Junker JU52 HB-HOT aircraft, dating from 1939, crashed into the Piz Segnas peak at an altitude of 2,540 meters, 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 in the afternoon.

Seventeen passengers and three crew members were on board, including an Austrian couple and their son, authorities said.

A picture taken on on August 5, 2018, shows mountains where a Junkers JU52 aircraft crashed on August 4 above Flims. /VCG Photo

Grisons canton's 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.

This kind of collectors' aircraft is not equipped with "black box" flight data and voice recorders, so investigators must rely on eyewitness accounts and analysis of debris.

One witness quoted by the 20 Minutes newspaper said "the plane turned 180 degrees to the south and fell to the ground like a stone," adding that the debris was scattered over "a very small area" – indicating that an explosion was unlikely to have been the cause of the crash.

Daniel Knech of the Swiss safety investigation service SESE said the crew did not have time to send out a distress signal and that the aircraft fell almost vertically out of the sky at relatively high speed.

Knech ruled out the idea that the plane had hit an object, such as a cable or another aircraft or that hot weather conditions contributed to the crash.

The plane had undergone a maintenance inspection in July and had an experienced flight crew of two pilots and one assistant aboard, according to JU-Air, which owns the plane.

The company said on its website that it was "deeply saddened" by the crash and had suspended its flight operations.

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.

(Top picture: Accident investigators and rescue personnel work at the wreckage of a plane that near Flims, Switzerland, August 5, 2018. /VCG Photo)

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Accident investigators and rescue personnel work at the wreckage of a Junkers JU52 aircraft in Flims on August 5, 2018, after it crashed into Piz Segnas, a 3,000-metre (10,000-foot) peak in eastern Switzerland on August 4.

Source(s): AFP