DThree people died in an air accident on the Wasserkuppe – now the public prosecutor’s office in Fulda has filed charges against the pilot. The 57-year-old man is accused of negligent killing and negligent risk to air traffic, the public prosecutor’s office in Fulda said on Tuesday. Next, the Fulda district court will rule on the admission of the charges and a trial.
On October 14, 2018, a light aircraft crashed into the runway in Gersfeld and killed a woman (39) and her two children (11 and 12). The pilot had tried to take off after trying to land on Hesse’s highest mountain, but was unable to. The machine broke a barrier and caught passers-by on an adjacent footpath.
To justify the indictment, the public prosecutor said: The pilot from Ludwigshafen had not sufficiently followed his due diligence and was responsible for the death of the three people. The machine was overloaded on the flight from Mannheim to the Hessian Rhön. Before the flight, the pilot failed to check the weight of the aircraft, which had four adult passengers. In view of the number of passengers, a review was formally necessary.
Landing error
The Ty Cessna 172N’s machine should only have weighed 1043 kilograms, according to the prosecutor’s office. Ultimately, she was overloaded with 32 kilograms. The pilot should not have been able to fly due to the associated loss of performance of the machine.
The public prosecutor also found that the pilot had made mistakes during the approach. He shortened the landing approach. An aircraft may have come towards him on the opposite runway after take-off. When he touched down he was way too fast. The decision to start the machine was ultimately made too late.
The machine shot over the end of the runway and collided with a pillar and a barrier that got stuck behind the propeller. “Then she crossed the street there and, with the propeller still running, caught the mother running across the street on a sidewalk with her children, who each suffered multiple serious and immediately fatal injuries,” said the spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office in Fulda, Christine Seban.
According to the airfield, the weather conditions at the time of the accident were unproblematic. The Federal Agency for Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) had determined that there had been no technical malfunction on the aircraft at the time of the accident.
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