GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – An 80-year-old woman landed a small plane on her fourth attempt in Door County, Wisconsin, with help from the control tower and a pilot who flew a small plane alongside her, when her husband, the pilot, was taken ill. Helen Collins had not flown a plane for 30 years and doesn’t have a pilot’s license. Her husband John Collins, 81, was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. Officials say the plane did not have enough fuel left for her to attempt a fifth landing.
The Green Bay Gazette reports that pilot Robert Vuksanovic went up in a Beechcraft Bonanza, a small plane that allowed him to fly beside the twin engine Cessna 414 that was going at about 170 mph when first intercepted. His wife, an experienced flight instructor, stayed on the ground and talked Helen Collins down to the airport. Her husband was the founder of a company that supplies parts to the plumbing industry in Sturgeon Bay in Door County, popular in the Midwest as a northern Wisconsin resort area.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Thirty-two of the 33 passengers and crew on a United Nations plane died when it crashed while trying to land at the Kinshasa Airport in DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) Monday afternoon 4 April. The plane was carrying UN staff, most but not whom all of worked for Monusco, the UN’s stabilization mission in Congo, but the UN news service reports that there were also five people on board who worked for humanitarian organizations.
The plane was trying to land in heavy rain, according to the UN, when it overshot the runway at 13:30, after a flight from Kisangani in the northeast.
Samedan / Engadin airport near St Moritz, canton Graubuenden (photo: wikipedia)
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Samedan Airport, just 5 km from the resort of St Moritz in canton Graubuenden, will have stricter rules for pilots landing their small planes there after a series of accidents in recent years, including a deadly one Sunday 19 December.
Two men flying in from Zagreb were killed and their plane destroyed at Bever, near the airport, during a difficult landing. Two planes, one from Warsaw and the other from Vienna, crashed in February 2010 after hitting snowbanks near the airstrip, with no injuries in one of the accidents but two deaths and one person injured in the other.
Swiss federal civil aviation (OFAC) authorities say pilots planning to land at Samedan, also known as Engadin Airport, will be given permission only if they have been on an initiation flight to familiarize them with the special conditions at the airport. Samedan sits at 1,707 metres altitude and is the highest airport in Europe. It is nestled among mountains with several high peaks, and landing there is more complicated than in an airport on the plains, OFAC officials note. The pre-flight training requirement goes into effect at the start of the new year.
Investigators have found the black box, which is intact, from the Air India Express flight that crashed when it overshot the runway, went over a cliff and burst into flames near Mangalore Saturday 22 May. The crash killed 158 people; eight people are being treated in hospital. Those who died were reportedly burned in the fire. The airport is on a kind of tabletop, with a deep ravine next to it.
Links to other sites: Reuters, India, Times of India
An Easyjet flight over the Saleve, near Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – An easyJet flight from Geneva to Nice 11 December landed safely after the 144 passengers spent 70 extra minutes in the air and were shown the brace position to prepare for a landing with an unsafe right main gear, Aviation Herald reports.
The pilots aborted the initial approach to Nice Airport, then tried two more times to get the gear down properly before “a low approach suggested all gear was down.”
