Eleven people, including liberal nurses who were to do their parachuting baptism, were killed on Sunday June 28 near Nancy in the still unexplained fall of the small plane which transported them, a tragedy which occurred before the eyes of their loved ones and which constitutes the deadliest light aviation accident in France. The victims are five skydiving instructors, five students and the pilot. All people on board died and “there are no collateral victims”, according to the prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle Yves Séguy.
The aircraft, of the Pilatus type registered in Germany, “started to take off” from the Nancy-Essey aerodrome and then “suddenly fell”, traced the Minister of the Interior Laurent Nuñez on site. Around 11:00 a.m., it crashed approximately 300 meters from the runway, on a grassy area, not far from a residential area and two roads. The wreckage was still there late in the afternoon.
Some families of victims “witnessed the crash of the aircraft, which adds to the shock and resulting psychological trauma,” the minister underlined. A medical-psychological emergency unit has been set up to take care of relatives of the victims and witnesses of the accident.
The students were a group of liberal nurses, “colleagues who had decided to do a parachute jump, no doubt to decompress”, according to Thierry Pechey, president of the Departmental Council of the Nursing Order in Meurthe-et-Moselle.
An investigation of rare technicality
The collective accidents department of the Paris public prosecutor’s office has announced that it will take charge of the judicial investigation. “The investigations, numerous and particularly technical, are entrusted to the air transport gendarmerie” (GTA), he specified in a press release. In total, around 35 gendarmes, including 15 investigators, were deployed on site.
According to the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), this is “the most serious general aviation accident in terms of human toll” in France – the expression “general aviation” designating all civil aviation activities other than commercial transport. “There has not been such a significant accident at the aeronautical level concerning skydiving for around thirty years,” underlined the Minister of Transport Philippe Tabarot, also on site.
For the former president of the BEA, Jean-Paul Troadec, “if there was a breakdown, it could be an engine failure, most likely”. A poor arrangement of passengers inside the aircraft could also have led to an imbalance, he said. Or, the pilot could have felt unwell, “a hypothesis that we will certainly examine because it was very hot”.
The plane was not necessarily equipped with a “black box”, but BEA investigators will likely be able to rely on videos taken by smartphone inside the plane, or by witnesses on the ground, assumed Jean-Paul Troadec. This Pilatus model can only carry 10 passengers in addition to the pilot and was therefore “stuffed to the hilt”, commented Yves-Marie Guillaud, president of the French skydiving federation.
The structure that organized the flight is not affiliated with its federation – which depends on the Ministry of Sports – but is placed under the aegis of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) and therefore “not controlled” according to him.
More than 500 km away, another air accident also left one dead on Sunday in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in the crash of a microlight in La Palud-sur-Verdon.
