BERLIN (AP) – Swiss investigators said on Thursday that a high-risk flight by the pilots of a vintage propeller plane led to an accident in 2018 in the Alps that killed all 20 people on board.
The 79-year-old Junkers Ju-52 operated by the local airline Ju-Air crashed on 4 August 2018 in the southeast of Switzerland.
The plane with 17 passengers and three crew members crashed almost vertically into a mountain. It flew from Locarno in southern Switzerland to its base near Zurich.
The Swiss Transport Safety Investigation Board said in its final report that “the pilots’ high-risk flight was a direct cause of the crash.”
When they entered a narrow mountain valley, ‘the flight crew steered the aircraft at low altitude, without the possibility of an alternative flight path and at an air speed that was dangerously low under the circumstances’, investigators said.
As the plane hit turbulence in the valley, the pilots ‘lost the high risk of flying through these unusual turbulences,’ they added. The plane flew too low to have enough space to recover.
The report also found that the center of gravity of the plane was too far behind during the doomed flight, a “dangerous situation (caused by inadequate flight preparation and errors in the Ju-Air software.”
It said the pilots had ‘become accustomed … to not complying with the rules for safe flight operations, and even taking a huge risk with passengers on board’, and that Ju-Air could not recognize the risks or prevented from violating the rules. .
The report also blamed the Federal Office of Civil Aviation in Switzerland for failing to identify a number of safety issues at Ju-Air, or that it was ineffective in dealing with them.
The office revoked Ju-Air’s commercial flight license in March 2019 after reviewing the risks of passenger flights with vintage aircraft, but said that if it meets different conditions, it can continue private flights for registered members.
Ju-Air said in a statement on Thursday that it would “do everything possible to learn from the crash.”
It is said that it is “glad that the direct causes of the accident can be clearly shown” and that it analyzes the issue of a problem with the center of gravity. Evaluations indicate that the problem only arose 35 years before the accident, but that in the meantime it did not cause any problems and that Ju-Air or regulators did not notice it.
It added that issues that led to pilots’ risky behaviors being discovered will be addressed in the future selection, training and supervision of pilots.