A small plane has crashed in the Simplon Pass area in the Swiss Alps, killing three people on board, authorities say.
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Police in the canton of Valais saidExternal link the Piper plane set off Sunday morning at 9 am from an airfield in western Switzerland for Italy. At around 10:30 am it crashed “due to unexplained circumstances” above the pass near the Italian border and burst into flames, a statement said.
The bodies of the pilot, a passenger and a small child were recovered from the wreckage. Police said they are still being formally identified.
The cause of the crash is not yet known. Accident investigators have started work, the statement added.
The Simplon Pass, which is 2,005 metres above sea level, connects southern Switzerland with northern Italy.
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1. The Gotthard Pass is legendary. As the scene of a swearing of allegiance between the first cantons in 1291 and of resistance against wartime occupation, the Gotthard region has a unique aura. Even the Matterhorn doesn’t have the symbolic value of this massif: the cradle of the confederation, the centre of the Alps, the…
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Officially inaugurated on May 19, 1906, it was for many years the longest in the world but it has never caught the spotlight as much as another major alpine tunnel – the Gotthard. “The Simplon tunnel has been in the shadow of the Gotthard tunnel for a long time, but actually it’s a very important…
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The peaks were buried in clouds, but I can’t use that as an excuse for avoiding the exact border. I’d already decided that learning about this pass would be vastly more interesting than scrambling over another glaciated peak. Plenty of huge mountains coming up in the next two weeks. So today I alternated between hiking…
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