Private Plane Crashes on Busy Munich Street; 6 Die, 14 Hurt

A private plane “dropped like a stone” into a busy part of the city Tuesday, killing six people, injuring 14 and setting a fire that consumed a McDonald’s restaurant and a city bus, officials said.

Walter Hermann, press officer for Munich police, said all three occupants of the plane were killed along with a bicyclist and two people in the McDonald’s parking lot. At least 10 of the injured were on the bus.

Police said the pilot was a student practicing landings in the twin-engine Piper aircraft, but a spokesman for air controllers at Munich’s Riem Airport said he was experienced and approaching to land after a checkout on instrument flying.

About 30 people were inside the McDonald’s restaurant, but police said all got out safely. The restaurant itself, on the Wasserburgerlandstrasse in the Trudering section of Munich, was burned out.

Firefighters needed more than an hour to control the flames on one of Munich’s busiest thoroughfares, slightly more than a mile from the airport and nine miles from downtown.

Guenter Scholz, another spokesman for Munich police, said: “The airplane was practicing landings at Riem and had made several shortly before the accident.”

He said the pilot was being tested by a government aviation security official, and a woman also was aboard, but no details about her were available.

“The plane dropped like a stone,” said one police official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Accounts of the crash differed.

Hermann said one version had it that the plane struck the bus and then plowed into McDonald’s.

Scholz said, “The plane’s wing hit the restaurant” and debris from the aircraft struck the bus.

Mathais Marhofer, a spokesman for air controllers at the airport, said in a telephone interview late Tuesday: “Some of what I’ve heard on radio and television reports is all wrong.”

The pilot “was not practicing touch-and-go landings,” he said. “He was on an IFR qualification checkout flight and crashed on his first approach.” IFR stands for instrument flight rules.