A well-known Austrian entrepreneur was killed in a plane crash near Medulin on Thursday Walter Pondorfer, founder and director of the company Funtime, which Austrian media associate with some of the most famous adrenaline attractions in Vienna’s Prater.
Pondorfer, whom the Austrian media Heute referred to as the “King of the Prater”, was identified by local media the day after the accident as one of the four victims of the crash of the Beechcraft G36 Bonanza, German registration number D-ENTT.
The accident happened on June 4, 2026 at around 11:18 a.m. local time near the Medulin airport. According to official data from the Agency for the Investigation of Accidents in Air, Maritime and Railway Traffic, the plane took off from Lienz Nikolsdorf Airport in East Tyrol towards Medulin Airport, and crashed two to three kilometers southwest of the airport. Four Austrian citizens died in the accident.
Heute announced that Pondorfer was the founder of Funtime, a company that has grown into an internationally renowned manufacturer of spectacular amusement rides since the early 1990s. Pondorfer’s company confirmed to Kronen Zeitung that he was among the dead. Funtime is best known for its free-fall towers, and one of their attractions is a tower over 100 meters high in Vienna’s Prater. According to Heute, Funtime’s rides have also been installed in the US, UK, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
The names of the other victims are so far being cautiously mentioned in the Austrian media or not published. They state that the two victims had pilot’s licenses, but it has not been officially confirmed who was flying the plane in the last moments of the flight. The only thing confirmed was that there were four Austrians in the plane aged 40, 48, 58 and 65, and along with Pandorfer and the two others who died, there were well-known entrepreneurs from East Tyrol.
Austrian media reports that the accident hit the local business community hard, especially in Dölsach and the area around Lienz. The Kleine Zeitung states that the people who were seen by the local community as entrepreneurs and visionaries are lost.
According to the testimony of retired pilot Nijaz Delic, the Austrians who died were not unknown in Medulin. Delić, who knows well the Medulin airport and the people who came there by plane, said that they did not come often, but that they had been to Istria in previous years as well.
“They didn’t come often. They either have a yacht or a house there, and they were there several times last year. They came on vacation. They were mostly very pleasant people, aged 50 to 60,” Delić said. From his words, it follows that at least part of the group had a private or tourist connection with Istria, either through a yacht, or through a house or regular vacation visits. Medulin, according to these statements, was not an unknown destination for them, but a place they had come to before.
Delić also spoke about the last seconds of the flight. According to his description, the plane initially appeared to be flying normally, at an altitude of about 300 meters, and then suddenly went into a spiral dive.
“Then suddenly it started flying in a spiral. It tried to level off. I think it managed to level off horizontally, but it still had a very steep angle towards the airport and simply went towards the hill, behind the forest. We didn’t see it again, there was no explosion, there was nothing,” Delić said.
DORH announced about the plane crash in Istria, they revealed the ages of the dead
Heute reports similar statements, who writes that the plane seemed stable at first, and then after about one and a half revolutions, it fell steeply. Austrian media report that there was no fire or explosion.
One of the questions that appears in the Austrian reports concerns the Medulin landing. Heute and ORF Tirol write that there are questions regarding the landing report at Medulin airport. At the same time, Heute states that, according to the Tyrolean aviation authorities, the pilot was known to be very conscientious and that he submitted the necessary flight plans for the outbound and return flights. However, this does not yet explain the cause of the decline.
In Walter Pondorfer’s profile, Heute also reminds us of the American legal proceedings related to Funtime. The company is embroiled in a multimillion-dollar legal battle following an accident at Orlando’s ICON Park amusement park in 2022, when a 14-year-old boy died after falling from a free-fall tower. It says that a US jury awarded the victim’s family $310 million in damages. Funtime denies liability and claims that the attraction was properly designed, tested and delivered, and that subsequent alterations and site handling were responsible for the accident.
The cause of the accident near Medulin is not yet known. The Agency for the Investigation of Accidents in Air, Maritime and Railway Transport reported that it was immediately informed of the incident by the Operational and Communication Center of the Ministry of Interior and the Croatian Air Navigation Control. Aviation accident investigators went to the crash site to conduct an investigation, and a safety investigation was launched in accordance with EU Regulation 996 from 2010.
The Agency says that at this stage it is not yet possible to say with certainty what happened. The legal deadline for completing an investigation is one year, but in practice, investigations can last shorter or longer, depending on the circumstances, the involvement of the country of registration, the country of manufacture and other professional procedures. The results, upon completion of the investigation, will be publicly published on the Agency’s website in the form of a final report. Until then, key questions remain open. Why did the plane lose control just before arriving in Medulin, who was piloting the plane in the last moments, was the cause a technical, medical or other problem, and were all elements of the flight and arrival at the airport carried out properly?
