25/11/2024
At least One Fatality After Swiftair 737 Freighter Hits Building
The flight's destination was Vilnius International Airport (EYVI) in Lithuania. On the day of this accident, there were four crew members on board the Swiftair 737. The crew made a routine departure from Leipzig, using runway 26L, before climbing to FL330.
The Swiftair crew planned to land their 737 freighter on runway 19 in Vilnius. They were reportedly on an ILS approach for this runway and had not reported anything out of the ordinary to the approach controller.
However, after the Swiftair crew was told to switch to the tower frequency, the controller there didn't hear anything from the 737. They were approximately four nautical miles away from the airport during the handover. The approach controller re-tried talking to the aircraft, too. Both controllers still cleared the flight to land shortly after these calls.
Unfortunately, the Swiftair 737 crashed into a two-storey residential building, located approximately 0.9 nautical miles before the threshold of runway 19 in Vilnius. Of the four people on board, one suffered fatal injuries. Rescue crews took the other three occupants, including the flight's captain, to nearby hospitals.
The impact of the Swiftair 737 caused a substantial fire. 12 people reportedly live in the building that the aircraft hit. Fortunately, at this time there are no reports of any injuries to people on the ground. Photos show debris from the aircraft in a wooded area located between the two-storey building and the runway.
A lot of cargo flights, like this one, take place late at night or in the early hours of the morning. But at this time, investigators don't know if this played a role in the crash of the Swiftair 737. The Boeing 737-400(SF) has registration EC-MFE. It is just over 31 years old and first entered service as a passenger aircraft with Australian Airlines in October 1993. It later flew in Qantas colours before its conversion into a freighter in 2015. Swiftair was its first operator after the conversion.
This is a developing story.
