BERLIN (AP) – Swiss researchers said on Thursday that “high-risk flights” by pilots of an old propeller plane caused an accident in 2018 in the Alps, which killed all 20 people on board.
The 79-year-old Junkers Ju-52, operated by the local airline Ju-Air, crashed in southeastern Switzerland on August 4, 2018.
The plane, which carried 17 passengers and three crew members, crashed almost vertically into a mountain. He was returning from Locarno, in southern Switzerland, to his base near Zurich.
The Swiss Transport Safety Research Council said in its final report that “the pilots’ high-risk flight was a direct cause of the accident”.
Upon entering a narrow mountain valley, “the crew piloted the aircraft at low altitude, with no possibility of an alternative flight route and at a dangerously low speed under the circumstances,” the investigators said.
When the plane hit the turbulence in the valley, “the high-risk way of flying through these unusual turbulences caused pilots to lose control of the aircraft,” they added. The plane was flying too low to have enough space to recover.
The report also found that the aircraft’s center of gravity was far behind during the doomed flight, a “dangerous situation (which) was caused by inadequate flight preparation and errors in the Ju-Air software.”
He said pilots “have gotten used to … not following the rules for safe flight operations and taking high risks even with passengers on board”, and that Ju-Air has failed to recognize the risks or prevent them from violating the rules.
The report also accused the Federal Civil Aviation Office of Switzerland for failing to identify “numerous security problems” at Ju-Air or for being ineffective in dealing with them.
That office in March 2019 revoked Ju-Air’s commercial flight license after analyzing the risks of passenger flights with old planes, but said it could, if it met several conditions, continue private flights for registered members.
Ju-Air said in a statement on Thursday that it “will do anything to learn from the accident”.
He said he was “happy that the direct causes of the accident could be shown clearly” and is looking into the issue of a problem with the center of gravity. The assessments suggest the problem arose 35 years before the accident, but it did not cause any problems in that period and was not noticed by Ju-Air or regulators, the company said.
He added that the issues that led to the undiscovered pilots’ risky behavior will be addressed in the selection, training and future supervision of pilots.