Glacier releases wreckage after 54 years

The wreckage was found a few days ago by a mountain guide. “From a distance I thought it was two backpacks,” says discoverer Dominik Nellen. He traveled with a group of six from the Jungfraujoch to the Konkordiahütte in the Bernese Alps – as the climbers approached the spot, they realized it must be a plane wreck.

Hüttenwirt helped solve mysteries
“We found a glasses case, a wet hat and also individual parts of the plane, such as the seat and the wings,” Nellen told the Berner Zeitung. The discovery was coincidental because he usually takes a different path. It was not immediately clear which aircraft it was – there was no identification on the wreckage. The landlord of the Konkordiahütte and his colleague Rebecca Gresch went to the wreck themselves on Friday morning and photographed them to get to the bottom of the mystery. “It was very special, parts of the plane could be seen all over the glacier. We didn’t know it was such an old plane,” Grafner says of “Krone”.

It was not possible to salvage the wreck in the 1960s
“The parts are scattered within a radius of about 200 meters,” says Gafner. He gave the photos to the Wallis cantonal police, who solved the mysterious case: They are the remains of a Piper Cherokee that crashed on June 30, 1968. Three people were killed as a result. The bodies were then recovered by helicopter. At that time, however, there were no technical possibilities to get the wreck out of the difficult terrain. That could now – 54 years later – be made good.