Most of the remaining wreckage from a cargo aircraft operated by global courier DHL that crashed in Vilnius is now being cleared from the site.
The development was first reported by BNS, a Baltic-based news agency, on November 29, 2024. A BNS photographer at the location noted that a crane and other machinery had arrived to gather the debris. Eventually, it will be moved to a special hangar.
“The hangar has been found, I won’t mention the location yet, but we have a place to store the parts of the crashed aircraft,” Arūnas Paulauskas, Police Commissioner General, told local reporters.
The process of clearing the smaller pieces of the crashed aircraft and taking them away from the site began on November 27, 2024, and continued through the next day, Lithuanian national broadcaster LRT reported.
What happened to Swiftair Flight 5960?
On November 25, 2024, a Boeing 737-400 freighter, operated by Swiftair of Spain on behalf of global logistics giant DHL, crashed near Vilnius Airport (VNO).
The aircraft came down near a residential area but narrowly missed hitting any buildings, so those living nearby were unharmed. The aircraft was delivering DHL parcels and had flown from Leipzig, Germany.
A Spanish pilot was killed in the crash, while three other crew members on board, nationals from Germany, Spain, and Lithuania, were injured. Local aviation experts are calling the crash one of the biggest aviation disasters to have occurred in independent Lithuania.
On November 27, 2024, Laurynas Naujokaitis, the Head of Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation at Lithuania’s Ministry of Justice, confirmed that the black boxes discovered in the cargo aircraft will be sent to Germany for decryption. The exact reason for the crash still cannot be confirmed until this process is completed.