Swiss Ju-52 pleasure flights planned to resume after accident

Investigators expect their examination of the crashed aircraft to last into the summer. © KEYSTONE / LAURENT GILLIERON

Vintage German aircraft pleasure flights are slated to resume in the next few months following a fatal crash that claimed 20 lives in Switzerland last year. But the first Ju-52 flights will take off from Germany rather than Switzerland, according to a newspaper report.

The plan is outlined by Kurt Waldmeier, head of the Ju-Air company that operates the aircraft business. The SonntagsZeitung newspaper has seen a memo that envisions one aircraft getting back in the air within three months.

On August 4 2018, a 79-year-old Ju-52 operated by Ju-AirExternal link, flying from Locarno in canton Ticino to Dübendorf in canton Zurich, crashed at altitude in canton Graubünden in eastern Switzerland killing all 20 people on board. 

The Swiss authorities temporarily allowed the company’s two other aircraft to resume flying before grounding them in November for extensive checks. Now Ju-Air plans to replace its crashed machine by taking an aircraft out of retirement from a museum in Mönchengladbach, western Germany, states the SonntagsZeitung article.

The company says one of the three aircraft will be fit to fly from April but will operate from Mönchengladbach rather than the usual airport in Dübendorf, on the outskirts of Zurich. Ju-Air has an agreement with the museum to have a Ju-52 on constant display, so it is obliged to have one of its aircraft stationed there.

The Swiss civil aviation authority told the newspaper that all three aircraft will have to prove their airworthiness before it will lift Ju-Air’s flight suspension over Swiss skies.