Twenty people died Saturday when one of the seven remaining airworthy Ju-52 airliners crashed while on a sightseeing trip in the Swiss Alps. The aircraft is reported to be HB-HOT, the same aircraft that visited AirVenture in 2012. There were 17 passengers and three crew onboard when the aircraft went down on a flight from Locarno to Dubendorf. The aircraft is one of three Ju-52s owned by JU-Air, a Swiss company that uses them on sightseeing and charters. The crash occurred near Martinsloch/Piz Segnaz at the 8330-foot level.
Flights through the Alps on the old corrugated metal airliners are popular and almost always fly full, according to local reports. This is the first major accident involving JU-AIR. Authorities have ruled out an in-flight collision and said the aircraft hit the ground in a near-vertical attitude. The captain of the aircaft was a 62-year-old airline pilot with 30 years of experience and he’d been flying the Junkers since 2004.
