Remembering Flugtag 88

I PACKED SOME remnants from Ground Zero of the Flugtag 88 disaster today, bits of my aviation heritage that I scavenged from parts scattered on the ground of Germany's worst air show. On 28 August 1988, two Italian Air Force jets collided over an audience of 300,000 people, killing 67 spectators and four pilots. More than 346 spectators sustained serious injuries in the resulting explosion and fire. The charred fragments that I discovered in a box I sealed that year will follow me back to Ireland where they remain the only connection I have to that day. I watched the 10 Aermacchi MB-339 PAN jets from the Italian Air Force display team, Frecce Tricolori, performed their pierced heart formation the day before the accident and it looked a little ragged then. In the 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 towards the audience, by a lone aircraft. You can't perform that maneuver on top of an American airfield unless the lone aircraft is flying away from the crowd. That restriction was not observed during Flugtag 88, making the accident much worse than it would have been if the maneuver line had been more conservative.

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