A SwiftAir 737-400, operating on behalf of DHL, crashed this morning (Monday 25 November), leading to the death of one, and injuring three.
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The aircraft had taken off from Leipzig Airport in Germany at 0200 (local time), before coming down an hour and half later, in what the company called an ’emergency landing’.
Local weather was normal for the time of the year, with temperature at around freezing, but with optimum visability given the time of day.
Renatas Pozela, a local Police official, said in a statement,
“The plane was landing, but it fell a few kilometres before the airport, skidded for several hundred meters, its wreckage caught a residential building.”
There are no reports of injuries for occupants of the house, with all 11 residents being evacuated a shortly after the accident.
Both Lithuanian authorities and DHL will undertake independent investigations, but initial reports plan to some kind of mechanical or technological failure lead to the crash, as Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian Aviation Authority added:
“In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the [air traffic control] tower, the pilots, until the very last second did not tell the tower of any extraordinary event.”
The 31-year-old Boeing 737-400 had a crew of four, and aside from the reported deaths, there has been no update on the condition of the rest of the crew.
Uncertainty Leads to more Questions
Whilst the consensus on the ground appears to be pointing towards an error with the aircraft – or its systems – German officials have questioned if the incident was in fact sabotage, connected to the recent severing of communications cables between Lithuanian and Sweden.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, said:
“We must now seriously ask ourselves whether this was an accident or whether it was another hybrid incident…in an allusion to the recent severing of cables in the Baltic Sea that officials have said could have been sabotage. The German authorities are working very closely with the Lithuanian authorities to get to the bottom of this.”
German officials are already investigating after a series of incendiary devices caused fires at DHL warehouses in the country earlier this year. Believing that all three incidents as interconnected and as a Russian attempt to undermine public support and confidence in European and Western infrastructure.
Despite this, however, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, appeared to dismiss this, stating
“The responsible agencies are working diligently. I urge everyone to have confidence in the investigating authorities’ ability to conduct a thorough and professional investigation within an optimal timeframe. Only these investigations will uncover the true causes of the incident; speculation and guesswork will not help establish the truth.”
Travel Radar will continue to bring you the latest on this developing story.
