Wetzlar
Glider crashes in residential area – pilot dies
Debris lies after the crash of the glider in the city of Wetzlar
© Christoph Weiss, Laubach/Fuldamedia/dpa
A glider crashed in Wetzlar on Pentecost Sunday. Any help came too late for the pilot. Many details are still open a day later.
On Sunday, the glider was broken into many pieces in the middle of the street in a residential area in Wetzlar – not far from a park and near the Lahn. The 57-year-old pilot died at the crash site. “It could have been much worse,” says the spokesman for the Wetzlar fire department, Alexander Lotz, at the crash site. Because with the summery Whitsun weather in the afternoon, many people are out and about in the park and on a children’s playground or are sitting in front of their houses and apartment blocks.
The police initially thought it was worse. A local resident reports that people are often out and about on the street and children play here. He spoke of “great luck” that nothing more had happened.
A few hours after the crash at around 2:20 p.m. yesterday, it was clear: the machine first crashed into a house roof and then crashed into one or more vehicles, police spokesman Guido Rehr reports. An 18-year-old driver from Hüttenberg in central Hesse was slightly injured and treated in a hospital. “But the worst thing for her was definitely the shock. That something suddenly came from above,” says another police spokesman today.
Pilot from Wetzlar sat alone in the machine
The pilot from Wetzlar sat alone in the machine, the woman alone in the car. Contrary to initial police fears, other people were not injured. Details of the course of the accident should result, among other things, from a survey of witnesses and residents. And the public prosecutor’s office and the Federal Office for Aircraft Accident Investigation have started the investigation.
These are usually very extensive and detailed and take some time, according to the police. Initial investigations indicated that “very difficult flight conditions and air conditions” prevailed on Pentecost Sunday. A local resident reported that he was lying on the couch and suddenly heard a loud bang. “That was extreme.” He had thought of a jet fighter or a gas explosion, but not of a plane crash. “It’s normal for gliders to fly over here,” said the neighbor.
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“I always see it when they approach for landing, they always fly over here at an angle.” Because on the other side of the Lahn, just a few hundred meters away, is the Wetzlar-Garbenheim glider airfield. “Just yesterday, another one flew pretty low,” he said on Sunday. “Glider pilots are part of the daily picture in the sky here,” reports fire brigade spokesman Lotz. It was not yet known whether the pilot of the plane that crashed was also on the approach to land at this glider airfield or took off from there. “You only have to register take-off and landing when the time comes,” said a police spokesman.
Around 53,000 people live in the central Hessian district town of Wetzlar. After the crash, around 40 firefighters, several ambulances, a helicopter and the police were on duty. The clearing-up of the rubble field of the glider, which was spread over a large area around Rathenaustraße, continued on Sunday until late at night. “The amount of damage cannot be quantified at this time,” the police reported.