On summer weekends every year, U.S. and West European air bases throw open their gates to hundreds of thousands of spectators for air shows. The aeronautical extravaganzas are beloved by military officials as morale boosters and lures for potential recruits. The shows are equally appreciated by the public for the excitement, speed and spectacle. But all that glamour was blasted away last week during a few hellish minutes at the Ramstein U.S. Air Base in West Germany, about 70 miles southwest of Frankfurt.
Traveling at 350 m.p.h., three MB-339A jets of Italy's ten-member Frecce Tricolori (Tricolor Arrows) aerobatic team slammed together in a flash of smoke and fire 200 ft. above Ramstein's main runway. One brightly painted red- white-and-green aircraft plummeted to the tarmac, and another crashed in a nearby woods well away from the audience of some 300,000. The third burning jet cartwheeled straight into the middle of an area of concession stands and picnickers alongside the runway, spewing fire and airplane parts over tents, cars, barbecue grills -- and people.
At first many spectators did not know what had happened. "I thought it was just some kind of special effect," said Victor Thompson, an airman stationed at Ramstein. Recalled another witness, U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant John Flanagan: "There was a second explosion and more fire, and that's when people started running, screaming. I saw this little boy just standing there. His hair was all singed, and the skin was coming off his face. Nobody was helping him. We stopped the police, and they picked him up."
It was the worst air-show accident in history. All three pilots and at least 47 spectators were killed in the holocaust. More than 360 people were injured, including many children.
Investigators late last week were still trying to determine precisely what went wrong. As they combed the wreckage at the site, a controversy erupted on both sides of the Atlantic over the safety rules governing air shows and the propriety of holding aerial maneuvers of any kind near civilian populations. Many critics called for a complete ban on shows, citing a list of 13 accidents in Europe during the past six years that have taken the lives of more than 110 people, most of them civilians. A bare 25 minutes before the Ramstein accident, horrified spectators watched a Finnish pilot dive to his death at an air show near Hasselt, Belgium.
Television footage of the Ramstein calamity showed the gaily painted jets performing the "arrow through the heart," one of the flashiest and supposedly easiest of their drills. Nine of the jets split into two formations and flew loops forming a heart, while trailing red, white and green smoke. The tenth, piloted by Ivo Nutarelli, 38, arched down in a solo loop intended to take him through the bottom of the heart as the two formations passed each other beneath him.
Nutarelli arrived too low and perhaps a split second early. On some videotapes, it appeared that his landing gear was extended, and photographs shortly before the crash clearly show the left main gear of his aircraft fully extended. Whatever the cause, he struck at least one of the other planes.