A CrossAir jet with some two dozen passengers takes off from Berlin en route Zurich. It's night time and beginning to snow but the flight is normal. The pilot has a great deal of experience, both as a crew member and as an instructor for CrossAir. The co-pilot is much younger but still a qualified pilot.
Since it's late at night there is little traffic at Zurich and CrossAir is cleared for landing on a runway lacking sophisticated technology, the usual runway not being used after 10PM because of noise.
Both pilots are searching for the runway lights when the airplane runs out of altitude and crashes into a hill, killing all but a few of those aboard.
Investigators go over all possible causes -- instrument failure, Air Traffic Control instructions, weather, and so on. The only conclusion is that the pilot was incompetent. He'd had many hours in the air but had consistently failed exams and made elementary errors. In this case he ignored the altimeter, which showed that he'd descended below safety height, and his co-pilot was reluctant to point out the mistake.
Except for the fact that he was a nincompoop and responsible for the deaths of two dozen people, I kind of liked this pilot because he made the kind of stupid mistakes that I would make. On a tourist flight over Swiss rivers, he got lost and unwittingly was flying over Italy. He didn't realize it until his passengers pointed out that the highway signs were in Italian. And he'd once retracted the landing gear while the airplane was on the ground and stationary.
But the problem wasn't the pilot's alone. It was systemic. In the 70s and 80s people began taking short flights instead of using mass transportation like a train or a bus. This caused many smaller airlines like CrossAir to expand rapidly and continue to employ pilots with fewer qualifications.
The conditions causing the crash have now been corrected and in fact CrossAir is no more, having been folded into SwissAir. I'd still think twice before flying with them.
