A seaplane crashed during takeoff from an Australian tourist island, killing three people including Swiss and Danish tourists and injuring three others. <\/p>\n
Only one of the seven people aboard the Cessna 208 Caravan was rescued without injury after the crash Tuesday afternoon on Rottnest Island, police said. <\/p>\n
The plane owned by Swan River Seaplanes was returning to its base in Perth, the Western Australia state capital 30 kilometers (19 miles) east of Rottnest Island, which is also known by its Indigenous name Wadjemup. <\/p>\n
The dead were a 65-year-old Swiss woman, a 60-year-old man from Denmark and the 34-year-old male pilot from Perth, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook said. <\/p>\n
The dead tourists\u2019 partners, a 63-year-old Swiss man and a 58-year-old Danish woman, survived. A Western Australian couple, a woman aged 65 and a 63-year-old man, also survived. <\/p>\n
It is not clear which passenger was uninjured. Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch said no survivor sustained life-threatening injuries. <\/p>\n
The three injured people were flown to a Perth hospital. <\/p>\n
Cook said the cause of the crash was not yet known. Reports that the plane had struck a rock at the entrance of a bay on the west side of the island could not be confirmed from video viewed so far, Cook said. <\/p>\n
Rottnest Island is renowned for its sandy beaches and cat-sized hopping marsupials called quokkas which are rare on the Australian mainland. The island\u2019s tourist accommodation is fully booked during the current Southern Hemisphere summer months. <\/p>\n
\u201cEvery Western Australian knows that Rottnest is our premier tourism destination,\u201d Cook told reporters. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor something so tragic to happen in front of so many people, at a place that provides so much joy, especially at this time of the year, is deeply upsetting,\u201d Cook added. <\/p>\n
Blanch said police divers had recovered the bodies on Tuesday night from a depth of 8 meters (26 feet). Wreckage of the plane was still being recovered. <\/p>\n
Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the aviation crash investigator, said specialist investigators were being sent to the scene. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs reported to the ATSB, during take-off the floatplane collided with the water, before coming to rest partially submerged,\u201d the bureau\u2019s chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said in a statement. <\/p>\n
Greg Quin, a tourist who was vacationing on Rottnest, said he saw the plane crash. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe were watching the seaplane take off and just as it was beginning to get off the water, it just tipped over and it crashed,\u201d Quin told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio in Perth. <\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people in the water on their boats rushed to the scene and I think got there really, really quickly,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the crash as \u201cterrible news.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThe pictures would have been seen by all Australians as they woke up this morning,\u201d Albanese told ABC television. \u201cMy heart goes out to all those involved.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A seaplane crashed during takeoff from an Australian tourist island, killing three people including Swiss and Danish tourists and injuring three others. Only one of the seven people aboard the Cessna 208 Caravan was rescued…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}