Rheintalflug Flight 102

On 23 February 1989, on Rheintalflug Flight 102, a scheduled aircraft of the Austrian airline Rheintalflug carrying nine passengers and two pilots crashed into Lake Constance on approach to Altenrhein Airfield. All eleven people on board died in the accident, including the then Austrian Minister of Social Affairs Alfred Dallinger and the pilot Brigitte Seewald, who was co-owner of the airline.

Flight history

The Aero Commander 690D “Jetprop900” aircraft, fully occupied with nine passengers, was scheduled to take off at 9 o'clock from Vienna-Schwechat Airport for Vorarlberg, where landing at Hohenems-Dornbirn Airfield was planned for about 1½ hours later. At that time, however, there was dense fog over Lake Constance and the Vorarlberg Rhine Valley, so that a landing was possible neither at Hohenems Airfield nor at the designated alternate airfields of Altenrhein and Friedrichshafen. Pilot Brigitte Seewald and co-pilot Johann Rainer therefore decided to divert to Leutkirch Airfield in Germany, located a few kilometres away. The flight took off from Vienna at 9:36 with a 36-minute delay. At around 10:35 co-pilot Rainer made contact with air traffic control, which informed him that a landing at Altenrhein Airfield in Switzerland, located closer to Hohenems, was now possible and that Hohenems still could not be approached because of dense fog. At 10:50 the aircraft crew made contact with the control tower in Altenrhein, which assigned them runway 10. At that point the aircraft was already on approach over the Pfänder.

Pilot Seewald decided to first fly over the airfield in order to survey the ground conditions. At 10:55 the aircraft was instructed by the tower in Altenrhein to expedite the approach, as a fog bank was heading towards the airfield. The co-pilot's acknowledgement of this instruction is the last documented radio contact with the aircraft. After the aircraft, following a sharp turn, was again over Lake Constance and thus on approach to the airfield's runway, it penetrated the fog bank over the lake while descending, whereby, in the view of the Swiss aviation accident investigation, the pilots, apparently owing to lack of visibility, are likely to have misjudged the distance to the water surface. The aircraft crashed into Lake Constance about 1.5 kilometres from the shore. The depth of the lake at this location is 76 metres.