On the 28th of August, 1988, 300,000 people gathered at the US Air Force Ramstein Air
Base in Germany to watch an air show featuring a demonstration by the Italian Air Force.
During the performance, a mid-air collision would result in what was at the time the deadliest
air show disaster in history – the emergency response to which would highlight a fundamental
breakdown in cooperation between the US and German authorities.
In the aftermath of World War II, the USA decided that, due to rising tensions with
the Soviet Union, they would need a greater air defence presence in Europe.
They wanted to move their vulnerable fighter units away from East Germany.
As part of a NATO expansion programme, France agreed to offer space in their zone of occupation
in West Germany, in Rhineland- Palatinate.
Construction of the Ramstein Air Base began in April 1948, near the city of Kaiserslautern,
and it was opened on the 1st of June 1953.
Complete with family housing, headquarters, schools, cinemas, administrative offices,
and a commissary, it was a massive air base covering over 3,000 acres.
It was originally made up of two separate bases, The Ramstein Air Station and the Landstuhl
Air Base, but these were joined together after the German government constructed the A6 Autobahn
which completely cut off access to the main gate of the Landstuhl base.
This was seen by some as an example of the ways in which the German and American authorities
often failed to communicate.
Meanwhile, in 1961, the Italian Air Force created a department whose specific purpose
was to form a national aerobatic team - the Pattuglia Acrobatica Nazionale Frecce Tricolori.
They replaced unofficial teams that had been performing since the 1930s, and were the largest
aerobatic patrol in the world.
A famous part of their display was to trail green white and red smoke in a representation
of the Italian flag – an appropriate symbol given that part of their name - Tricolori,
or “Three colours” – was a reference to the flag.
Only the best pilots, with more than 1,000 flight hours, were chosen to be part of the
Frecce Tricolori.
Despite this, and the fact that the squad was purely demonstrational, it was still a
very dangerous job.
Within the first six months of the department’s existence, there had been four accidents,
with two members of the team dying as a result.
Another famous formation was known as “The Pierced Heart”.
To complete this manoeuvre, two groups of aircraft flew in opposite directions to form
a heart shape, which was then pierced by a lone aircraft.
During the afternoon of Sunday the 28th of August, 1988, a huge crowd of 300,000 people
had gathered at the Ramstein base to watch the Frecce Tricolori.
Air shows had become a huge fundraiser for the base.
Some of the units located there were, in fact, deployed for the day working on ice cream
trucks to help raise money from the vast crowds.
The weather on the day was perfect for flying - clear and sunny.
The Frecce Tricolori began their demonstration and performed several complex manoeuvres to
the general delight and admiration of the crowd.
It was all building to the climatic performance of The Pierced Heart.
The manoeuvre initially went well.
Two groups of planes formed a heart shape in the sky above the airbase, approaching
one another for a close pass at the lower point of the heart at 3:44pm.
The plane that should have subsequently “pierced” the heart, however, approached too low and
too fast.
Before the two groups of planes could clear one another, this plane, the call sign of
which was “Pony 10”, smashed into them at high speed, just 45 metres (or 150 feet)
above the ground.
Three aircraft were involved in the collision.
Pony 10 crashed into the runway below, exploding into a violent fireball and showering the
watching spectators with burning fuel and debris.
The largest parts of the plane came to rest against a refrigerated ice cream trailer.
Meanwhile, one of the other aircraft that Pony 10 had hit crashed directly into a medical
evacuation helicopter that was parked on the ground.
The third aircraft exploded in the air, raining down more debris on the crowd below.
Several planes remained in the air, having narrowly escaped being involved in the collision.
They regrouped and flew to Sembach Air Base, around 30 kilometres (or 19 miles) away.
As they left the area, the situation on the ground was chaotic.
The crowd had been showered with debris, killing 28 people instantly.
Two of the three pilots involved in the collision had died on impact.
The third had managed to eject, but his parachute had not opened and he had also died when he
hit the ground.
American firefighters and ambulance personnel arrived on the scene just two minutes after
the collision.
It became quickly apparent, however, that the US vehicles (which usually only served
the base itself) did not have sufficient medical equipment to cope with a disaster of this
scale.
Calls were placed to German emergency services, but ambulances that were despatched were held
up at the entrance to the base.
German vehicles were not normally allowed to enter, and it took some time before permission
could be obtained to allow them entry to attend to the wounded.
German medivac helicopters started arriving at 4:10pm, but it was nearly an hour after
the collision, before enough ambulances had arrived to treat the injured.
The delay in getting adequate resources to the site was also compounded by the chaotic
nature of the immediate response.
A doctor who was present at the time later recalled the scene:
“We are searching for burnt patients that are pulled and transported unaided away from
us by the Americans…
Not all the injured people are transported away by helicopter or ambulance.
There is total chaos around us and some of the injured are even transported on pickup
trucks that are not leaving (via) an emergency exit, they are driving beside the drifting
visitors.”
The confusion wasn’t limited to the scene.
The German authorities still had little idea of the scale of the disaster even an hour
after the collision.
One medic on site later described the confusion:
“It was not possible to find an officer in charge, a director of operations or even
a contact person…
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.”
Many patients were rushed off the base by American personnel, who used wooden planks
rather than waiting for stretchers, and carried patients in trucks or other vehicles rather
than waiting for ambulances.
While this allowed casualties to be transported more quickly, it also meant that they could
not receive treatment during transport… and, worst still, American drivers who were
unfamiliar with the area risked taking a circuitous route or transporting patients with severe
injuries to the wrong hospital.
Equally, hospitals which had been given little information about the disaster, were unable
to prepare for the influx of severely injured patients.
A German paramedic later reported the conditions they found at one nearby medical centre:
"When I arrived in Landstuhl, severely burnt people 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."
At 6:30pm a bus full of injured people (including some with severe burns) arrived at a hospital
in Ludwigshafen, around 80 kilometres (or 50 miles) away.
There was no paramedic present, just a non-German-speaking driver that did not know the area, and had
spent hours desperately searching for a hospital.
In all, 67 spectators and three pilots died in the accident, and 500 people required hospital
treatment.
In the aftermath of the disaster, questions were asked both about the initial cause of
the accident, and the response to it.
Why had Pony 10 come in so low and so fast for the final part of the Pierced Heart manoeuvre?
While some theorised that it could have been due to a technical issue or even sabotage,
there was no evidence to support this.
The most likely cause of the accident, it was concluded, was pilot error.
The response from the US military and the German civil authorities was criticised.
Investigations revealed that, for much of the accident, it was completely unclear who
was in charge.
Communication throughout was extremely poor – sometimes relying on amateur radio operators
who happened to have been at the air show to transmit vital messages.
The US military prioritised transporting patients over providing first aid, and in many ways
German and American protocols were so different that a unified response was impossible.
Many air shows across Europe were cancelled in the wake of the disaster, and it was three
years before another air show of the same scale would take place in Germany.
During that time rules were put in place to establish a much larger minimum distance between
aerobatic displays and crowds, and manoeuvres oriented toward any crowd were banned outright.
Because of these changes, air shows across Europe are significantly safer than they were
before the disaster.
Today there stand two memorials to the 70 people that lost their lives as a result of
the disaster – one accessible to the German public just outside the west gate of Ramstein
Air Base, and a separate memorial inside the base itself.