Memorial service for Crossair crash victims takes place

A memorial service is underway for the ten people who died in Monday's Crossair plane crash near Zurich.

A memorial service is underway for the ten people who died in Monday’s Crossair plane crash near Zurich.

The transport minister, Moritz Leuenberger, is representing the Swiss government at the service in Basel cathedral. Also attending are diplomats from Germany, France, Spain, Moldova and Slovakia, the countries from which the seven passengers and three crew members came.

The ceremony, which is being broadcast live on Swiss-German television, is being transmitted to the airports at Kloten, where the plane took off from, Dresden, its destination, and Basel, where Crossair is based.

At 1400, the whole of the SAir Group held a minute’s silence to honour the memory of those who died. Crossair is part of the Sair Group.

Meanwhile, efforts are continuing to establish the cause of the crash, which happened two minutes after the Crossair Saab-340 took off from Zurich-Kloten airport.

The two black box flight recorders were sent to a special laboratory in Canada on Thursday to be examined. The results are expected by next Tuesday or Wednesday, if the recorders aren’t too badly damaged. One of the black boxes registers all the technical information about the flight. The other records all the cockpit conversations and announcements to passengers.

On Thursday, Crossair announced that its timetables had returned to normal. Twenty-one flights had been cancelled the previous day as safety checks were carried out on the other Saab-340s in its fleet.