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Swiss air force plane clips TV cable at ski championships – Metro US

Swiss air force plane clips TV cable at ski championships

ZURICH (Reuters) – A Swiss air force turboprop plane clipped a television cable above the finish lines at the skiing world championships in St Moritz on Friday, briefly interrupting the event but causing no injuries, police said.

The two-seat PC-7 aircraft was flying as part of a team formation on a training exercise when it brought down the cable that carries an overhead TV camera for ski races, said police in the eastern Grisons canton. The plane then landed safely.

“With its dynamic, elegant and precise flight performances, the PC-7 TEAM proves to the public that the Swiss Armed Forces and Air Force are highly trained and capable of top performances. We show the crowd how we master the dynamics of military flying,” the group says on its website.

Falling cameras have disrupted ski races before.

Austria’s Marcel Hirscher criticized the use of drones to film races after one of them crashed and almost hit him in a race at Madonna di Campiglio in the Italian Alps in 2015.

The Swiss air force has had several other accidents of late. Two pilots died when a military helicopter crashed just after takeoff in September, and another pilot died when his fighter jet slammed into a mountainside a month before.

(Reporting by Michael Shields; editing by Mark Heinrich)