The crash occurred just two minutes after the six-seat Extra EA-400 propeller plane took off from Engadin Airport at 5:20 p.m., according to a statement from police in Graubünden, an eastern Swiss canton.
The plane had arrived from Denmark on March 13 and was returning to Roskilde, near Copenhagen. It went down in a residential area on the northern outskirts of La Punt Chamues, a village in Engadin Valley. Fortunately, it did not strike any buildings.
Emergency responders arrived promptly and found the burning wreckage. Mayor Peter Tomaschett told Swiss newspaper Blick that the situation could have been much worse:
“Had the crash site been just a few dozen meters further down, it would have hit an area with many primary residences.”
The plane crashed in a holiday home area, which was mostly unoccupied at the time. An eyewitness reported that the aircraft spun around its own axis in the last three seconds before impact. “Then there was an explosion and a huge fireball,” the witness said.
Engadin Airport, located in Samedan, just a few miles from the luxury ski resort St. Moritz, is one of Europe’s highest airfields, sitting at an elevation of 1,700 meters.
Although officials have not yet confirmed the victims’ identities, Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet reported that the deceased were Line Markert, head of the law firm Horten, her partner Andreas Christensen, and their son, a ninth-grade student in South Funen.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Markert lived in Copenhagen and studied international politics at Miami University in the U.S.
The cause of the crash remains unclear
The Office of the Federal Prosecutor has launched an investigation.
This marks the second small aircraft crash in Switzerland this year. On February 6, a five-seater turboprop aircraft crashed into a field near the Grenchen airstrip, about 10 miles north of Bern. That crash also involved three people—two women and a man—who all survived, though two were hospitalized by ambulance and one was airlifted, according to Swissinfo.
