Attersee divers recover plane wreckage from 160-meter depth

Specialized divers Markus Sturm and Manfred Führmann successfully completed a high-risk recovery operation at Lake Attersee in Austria. The divers descended to a depth of approximately 160 meters to reach the wreckage of a small aircraft that crashed during a flight school session.

The mission involved manually attaching ropes to the heavily damaged fuselage after underwater robots failed to secure the site. While the divers were initially scheduled to spend only 90 seconds at the bottom, they remained for approximately two minutes due to the difficulty of finding stable attachment points.

The aircraft crash resulted in the deaths of a 19-year-old flight student and a 24-year-old instructor, both of whom were from Germany. Following the successful attachment of the ropes, the wreckage was gradually raised to the surface. The divers required a lengthy three-hour ascent to perform necessary decompression stops and avoid life-threatening physiological effects.