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In Italy the Ramstein crash sent the nation into mourning, but also created a furious debate over the use of the Frecce Tricolori in air shows. The Italian air force restricted future appearances to nonaerobatic flyovers at military functions. Officials in Fribourg, Switzerland, quietly disinvited the Italians to an air show this weekend.
Back in Washington both the Air Force, with its Thunderbirds flying team, and the Navy, with its Blue Angels, were quick to assert that a Ramstein-type catastrophe could not happen in the U.S. and to defend such demonstration flights. "I don't know that the risk is too high," said Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. "We have crashes in training every day." In all, 22 Blue Angels have been killed in crashes since 1946, and 19 Thunderbirds since 1953. But with thousands of air shows since World War II, no spectators have died in accidents involving military teams.
Indeed, the shows are one of the country's major spectator attractions, drawing 18 million people a year, vs. 16.7 million for professional football games. Thunderbirds Spokesman Donald Black justified the aerobatic teams as a way of demonstrating "capabilities of high-performance aircraft and the high degree of proficiency and skill required to operate them."
In West Germany, however, the public's confidence in allied air forces was on the ebb even before the Ramstein disaster. In recent years West Germans have grown increasingly intolerant of low-altitude exercises by NATO fighters, mostly F-16s, whose pilots must practice the ground-hugging tactics they would use in battle. In the past seven years, 20 F-16s have crashed in West Germany, several in populated areas and one a bare ten seconds' flying time from a nuclear power reactor near Landau. Three aircraft crashed on a single day in July. For the past three years demonstrators have protested the Ramstein show as a symbol of the low-flight issue; they marched outside the base the day before the disaster.
$ U.S. defense officials are worried about the pressure to ban low-altitude flights. "I am concerned that this accident would cause people to relate it somehow to low-level training," said U.S. Army General John R. Galvin, the NATO commander. NATO defense planners rely heavily on aircraft to offset a Warsaw Pact advantage in tanks, and effective use of aircraft demands low approaches to avoid radar and ground-to-air missiles.
In a cosmetic response to the changed public mood, West German Defense Minister Scholz had already somewhat reduced the volume of low-flight military exercises, from 68,000 hours a year to 66,000, and insisted that his new ban on aerobatics applied not just to the German Luftwaffe but to NATO allies as well. In stating that claim, he seemed to be challenging the idea of the extraterritoriality of allied air bases. The 1963 NATO troops statute gives U.S. forces in West Germany the right to hold exercises in the air "as is necessary to the accomplishment of its defense mission."