Ramstein airshow disaster

Ramstein airshow disaster

The only medical emergency standby MEDEVAC helicopter was hit by one of the falling aircraft, fatally injuring its pilot, Capt. Kim Strader.
Accident summary
Date	August 28, 1988
Type	Mid-air collision
Site	Ramstein Air Base West Germany 49°26′18″N 007°36′13″E / 49.43833°N 7.60361°E / 49.43833; 7.60361Coordinates: 49°26′18″N 007°36′13″E / 49.43833°N 7.60361°E / 49.43833; 7.60361
Total injuries	approx. 1,000, 346 of them serious (ground)
Total fatalities	70 (including 67 on the ground)
First aircraft
Type	Aermacchi MB-339PAN
Name	Callsign "Pony 10"
Operator	Frecce Tricolori Aeronautica Militare
Crew	Lt. Col. Ivo Nutarelli (killed)
Second aircraft
Type	Aermacchi MB-339PAN
Name	Callsign "Pony 1"
Operator	Frecce Tricolori Aeronautica Militare
Crew	Lt. Col. Mario Naldini (killed)
Third aircraft
Type	Aermacchi MB-339PAN
Name	Callsign "Pony 2"
Operator	Frecce Tricolori Aeronautica Militare
Crew	Capt. Giorgio Alessio (killed)

The Ramstein airshow disaster is the second-deadliest airshow incident (following that in 2002 at Sknyliv).^[1] It took place in front of about 300,000 people on August 28 1988, in Ramstein, West Germany, near the city of Kaiserslautern at the US Ramstein Air Base airshow Flugtag '88.

Aircraft of the Italian Air Force display team collided during their display, crashing to the ground. Sixty-seven spectators and three pilots died, 346 spectators sustained serious injuries in the resulting explosion and fire.^[2]

Background

Ten Aermacchi MB-339 PAN jets from the Italian Air Force display team, Frecce Tricolori, were performing their 'pierced heart' (Italian: Cardioide, German: Durchstoßenes Herz) formation. In this formation, two groups of aircraft create a heart shape in front of the audience along the runway. In the completion of the lower tip of the heart, the two groups of planes pass each other parallel to the runway. The heart is then pierced, in the direction of the audience, by a lone aircraft.

The crash

The mid-air collision took place as the two heart-forming groups passed each other and the heart-piercing aircraft hit them. The piercing aircraft crashed onto the runway and consequently both the fuselage and resulting fireball of aviation fuel tumbled into the spectator area, hitting the crowd and coming to rest against a refrigerated trailer being used to dispense ice cream to the various vendor booths in the area.

At the same time, one of the damaged aircraft from the heart-forming group crashed into the emergency medical evacuation UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, injuring the pilot, Captain Kim Strader. He died weeks later, on September 17 1988, at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, from burns he suffered in the accident.

The pilot of the aircraft that hit the helicopter had ejected, but was killed as he hit the runway before his parachute opened. The third aircraft disintegrated in the collision and parts of it were spread along the runway.

After the crash, the remaining aircraft regrouped and landed at Sembach Air Base.

The Aermacchi hits the ground

A wall of flames reaches the crowd line

Chaos immediately after the impact

Timeline

Time	Details
15:40	Start of the Frecce Tricolori
15:44	Collision involving the planes with callsigns Pony 1, Pony 2 and Pony 10
15:46	Fire fighters arrive
15:48	First American ambulance arrives
15:51	First American ambulance helicopter arrives
15:52	Second American ambulance helicopter arrives
15:54	First American ambulance helicopter takes off
16:10	German ambulance helicopter, Christoph 5 from Ludwigshafen, arrives
16:11	German ambulance helicopter, Christoph 16 from Saarbrücken, arrives
16:13	10 American and German ambulances arrive
16:28	About 10–15 ambulances arrive. 8 medical helicopters (US Air Force, ADAC, SAR) at the scene
16:33	First medical helicopter of the Rettungsflugwache arrives
16:35	Doctor on emergency call over the radio: "We are searching for burn patients that are pulled and transported unaided away from us by the Americans.[citation needed] They told us nobody from them are here no more.[citation needed] Not all the injured people are transported away by helicopter or ambulance.[citation needed] There is total chaos around us and some of the injured are even transported on pick-up trucks that are not leaving [via the] emergency exit, they are driving beside the drifting visitors. It was a terrible sight to see people with burnt clothes and sagging burnt skin, squirming with pain or transfixed and shocked with pain on these vehicles."
16:40	First low platform trailer for transport of the dead bodies arrives
16:45	Second low platform trailer for transport of the dead bodies arrives
16:47	At that time the German headquarters for emergencies had no clue of the scale of the disaster, made obvious by the radio communication: "Yes, and that is the problem. We don't know yet what has happened, how many injuries and what else. The leading emergency medical did not send any feedback yet. He wants to have a synoptic view first."
17:00	Helicopters begin arriving en masse at Landstuhl Army Hospital.
17:00	At that time several medics arrive with helicopters. Later they said: "At the time we arrived shortly after 5:00 there were no injured people no more. We could see that the last badly injured people were loaded into American helicopters. We could see some pick-up trucks with injured people transporting them away. It was not possible to find an officer in charge, a director of operations or even a contact person [...] so we got to the Johannis hospital in Landstuhl by [our] own initiative. Asking several action forces, paramedics, police officers nobody could name a director of operations. I was asking for a managing paramedic of the operation to coordinate the evacuation. But there was none."
18:05	An ambulance helicopter arrives at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. The paramedic said later: "We found a large number of severely burnt, badly injured people absolutely unaided. [...] When I arrived in Landstuhl, severely burnt people partly lay on wooden planks and no paramedics were there. After I aided an injured person and left her with a hospital nurse that attended us at the flight, I was treating several injured people at the helicopter landing zone at the military hospital and did not see even one American medic there."
18:20	Dead bodies are transported away from the scene with the two platform trucks
18:30	A bus full of injured people arrives in Ludwigshafen (80 km away). A paramedic later said either: "five severely burnt people were inside the bus. There was no paramedic attending this transport."

Emergency response

Of the 31 people who died at the scene, 28 had been hit by shrapnel in the form of airplane parts, concertina wire and debris from items on the ground.^[3] Sixteen of the fatalities occurred in the days and weeks after the disaster due to severe burns, the last being the burned and injured pilot from the helicopter.^[4]

About 500 people had to seek hospital treatment following the event.

The disaster revealed serious shortcomings in the handling of large-scale medical emergencies by German civil and American military authorities and their cooperation. The American military did not allow German ambulances to enter the base and let them help immediately. The rescue work was criticized for lacking efficiency and coordination.^[5] The rescue coordination center in Kaiserslautern was unaware of the disaster's scale as much as an hour after its occurrence, although several German Medevac helicopters and ambulances had already arrived on site and left with patients. American helicopters and ambulances provided the quickest and largest capacities for evacuating burn victims, but could not provide sufficient capacities for treating them or had difficulty finding them. More confusion was added-to by the American military using different standards for intravenous catheters from German paramedics before a single standard was codified in 1995.^[6]

Over 600 people reported to the clinic that afternoon to donate blood.

A crisis counseling center was immediately established at the nearby Southside Base Chapel and remained open through the week. Base mental health professionals provided group and individual counseling in the weeks following, and surveyed the response workers two months following the tragedy and again six months after the disaster to gauge recovery.^[7]

Investigation

Different video recordings of the accident were taped. Upon completing the cardioid figure, the piercing aircraft (Pony 10) came in too low and too fast at the crossing point with the other two groups (five aircraft on the left and four on the right) completing the heart shaped figure. Lieutenant Colonel Ivo Nutarelli, lead pilot and flying Pony 10, was unable to correct his altitude or slow his speed and collided with the leading airplane (Pony 1, piloted by Lt. Col. Mario Naldini) of the left formation "inside" the figure, destroying the plane's tail section with the front of his aircraft.^{[citation needed]} Pony 1 then spiralled out of control, hitting the closer plane on its lower left (Pony 2, piloted by Captain Giorgio Alessio). Lt. Col. Naldini ejected but was killed as he hit the runway before his parachute opened, his plane crashed onto a taxiway near the runway, destroying a medevac helicopter and fatally injuring the pilot, Captain Kim Strader. Pony 2, the third plane to be involved in the disaster, was severely damaged from the impact of Pony 1 and crashed onto and beside the runway, exploding in a fireball. Captain Alessio died instantly and small fragments of the plane were spread along the runway.

Pony 10, the aircraft that started the crash, now completely out of control, in flames, and with the forward section disintegrated following the impact with Pony 1, continued on a ballistic trajectory across the runway. The plane hit the ground ahead of the spectator's stands, exploding in a fireball and destroying a police vehicle that had been parked on the "runway" side of the concertina wire that defined the active runway area. The plane continued, cartwheeling for a distance before picking up the three strand concertina wire fence, crossing an emergency access road, slamming into the crowd, and hitting a parked ice cream van. The crash site was considered the "best seats in the house", being centered on the flightline and as close to the airshow as civilian spectators could get. It was the first area in the airshow viewing area that was very crowded. The entire incident, from collision of the first two planes to the crash into the spectators, took less than seven seconds, leaving no time for people in the crowd to run away. The low altitude of the maneuver (45 meters above the crowd) also contributed to the short time frame.

An examination of photos and footage from the disaster showed that Pony 10's landing gear came down at some point; it has been suggested that this could have been lowered intentionally as a last second effort by Lt. Col. Nutarelli to try and slow his plane down to avoid the impact, but there is no substantial evidence pointing to this, the undercarriage could have been lowered by a number of factors. In January 1991, Werner Reith, a German journalist from the newspaper Tageszeitung, suggested in an article that the Ramstein disaster could have been caused by some sudden technical problem – or even sabotage – in Nutarelli's plane; again, no possible evidence could be collected, Reith pointed out that Lt. Col. Nutarelli and Lt. Col. Naldini were supposed to know details about another air disaster, the 1980 Ustica Massacre, citing Italian press sources. Judge Rosario Priore, who was investigating the case at the time, found that they were performing training flights nearby minutes before the Ustica incident, but he definitely rejected their deaths as sabotage.

References in popular culture

The airshow disaster memorial with the names of the victims

• The German band Rammstein has stated that, despite fan speculation, their band is not named after the disaster, though their self-titled song is a reference to the event.^[8]
• The disaster was featured on the February 22, 2008, episode of Shockwave on The History Channel.
• A similar disaster is portrayed in the German made strategy PC game Emergency: Fighters for Life

See also

• Sknyliv airshow disaster
• 2011 Reno Air Races crash
• List of airshow accidents

References

1. ^ 4 held over worst air show crash, CNN World
2. ^ 1988 Ramstein air crash stirs memories, www.stripes.com
3. ^ Ramstein survivor support group
4. ^ SL Army officer burned in air show crash dies, www.deseretnews.com
5. ^ Ramstein Air Show Disaster Kills 70, Injures Hundreds www.wired.com/ThisDayInTech
6. ^ ISO 10555-1:1995 Sterile, single-use intravascular catheters – Part 1: General requirements
7. ^ Trauma, Disasters and Recovery, Robert J. Ursano, M.D., Carol S. Fullerton, Ph.D., Kathy M. Wriqht, Ph.D. and James E. McCaroll, Ph.D., editors. Department of Military Psychiatry et al., page 12ff
8. ^ Herzeleid.com Quote from MTV interview

External links

• Le crash de Ramstein (French) – Extensive photo gallery
• Robert-Stetter.de – Photo gallery of the incident
• Flugtag88 Memorial – Includes eyewitness accounts
• West Germany Hellfire from The Heavens – Time magazine article from 12 September 1988
• Airliners.net – Marc Heesters' photograph of the incident
• Ramstein – The air show catastrophe and its aftermath – Information about 2008 documentary, a WDR and SWR co-production
• Complete aerobatic maneuver including crash (video)

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