That was close! Swiss air force plane clips TV cable

Patrouille Suisse, St Moritz, February 11 Keystone

A Swiss air force plane clipped a television cable above the finish line at the skiing world championships in St Moritz on Friday, sending a camera plummeting to the ground and briefly interrupting the event. No one was injured, police said.

The two-seat PC-7 aircraft, part of the Patrouille Suisse aerobatic team, was flying on a training exercise when it brought down the cable that carries an overhead television camera for ski races, said police in canton Graubünden.

The plane landed safely but was slightly damaged. All further displays at the ski championships were cancelled. 

Falling cameras have disrupted ski races before. Austria’s Marcel Hirscher – who won gold in the giant slalom on Friday – criticised the use of drones to film races after one of them crashed and almost hit him in a race at Madonna di Campiglio in the Italian Alps in 2015:

The Swiss air force has had several other accidents of late. Two pilots died when a military helicopter crashed just after takeoff in September, and another pilot died when his fighter jet slammed into a mountainside a month before.  

In reaction to Friday’s incident, Defence Minister Guy Parmelin told Swiss public television SRFExternal link in Munich, where he has been attending a security conference, that he thought that “we quite often have these kinds of accidents”.  He promised an exact analysis of the situation.