West Germany Hellfire from The Heavens

By James O. Jackson/Bonn

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.

"I yelled, 'Oh, God,' and looked over my shoulder and saw nothing but fire," said Antonio Vivona, 29, the youngest member of the team. "For some damned reason Ivo hit Giorgio Alessio, the No. 2 in the left group, who then hit our chief, Mario Naldini." Vivona's jet was hit by flying debris, but he managed to put down on an emergency landing field six miles away.

& As the fireball mushroomed upward, dozens of spectators suffered fatal burns. Some stood dazed and naked amid the chaos, clothes burned off and blackened skin hanging in shreds. At least six of the dead and 40 of the injured were U.S. citizens, mostly military personnel or their dependents. Nearly all of the remaining dead and injured were West Germans.

West German medical officials later complained that air-base authorities were inadequately prepared for such a disaster. "I have to ask myself why there were no mobile medical teams at the site," said Wolfgang Herbig, a hospital director in the nearby town of Kaiserslautern. "There are always many ambulances at motor races or soccer games." Base officials defended their planning. "You don't plan for 300 and more injuries," protested one U.S. Government official. "If you had any idea that might happen, you wouldn't let the show take place."

Exactly so, said many critics. The Frecce Tricolori have a reputation for recklessness. Nutarelli, the oldest on the team, was a daredevil known for a breathtaking stunt called the bell ringer, in which he killed his engine in midair, plummeted downward and restarted it in time to pull up before crashing. "The Italians fly with brio, with panache and with skill," said Jacques Bottelin, leader of France's Patrouille Martini civilian flying team. "But they push too far." The Italian team has performed in the U.S., most recently two years ago at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. Significantly, the Italians were prevented by FAA safety standards from flying the heart maneuver over spectators.

The rules at Ramstein apparently did not prohibit such maneuvers. The commanding officer of the Italian team, Lieut. Colonel Diego Raineri, said the squad had performed a test run of its act the day before the show for air-base authorities, who had approved it. U.S. officials at Ramstein declined any comment on the disaster, except to express condolences to victims and their families.

West German officials had a more visceral reaction. Defense Minister Rupert Scholz declared that air shows "will never again take place," though he soon modified the ban to cover only military displays. Shows scheduled later this month in Bitburg and Lechfeld were hurriedly canceled. Many officials expressed doubt that the Ramstein event -- an annual fixture since 1955 -- would ever be held again.

In Britain authorities decided to go ahead with this week's Farnborough air show despite calls for cancellation of the biennial display, one of the world's biggest. British officials said they were confident their safety rules would prevent an accident like the one at Ramstein. France too will proceed with scheduled shows because its rules, according to an air force statement, "are very rigorous." Spanish officials said they were "studying" whether to cancel a joint Spanish-American aerial display in Zaragoza next month, but it will probably go on.

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."

Scholz's declarations raise the delicate question of whether a West German Defense Minister can decide what is and what is not part of NATO's defense role. But as a NATO diplomat in Bonn noted, "We are in an emotionally charged situation." Nowhere more so than at Ramstein, where the blackened remains of the Italian jet lay crumpled late last week amid abandoned picnic tables, uneaten potato salads and indelible memories of nightmare.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Rome and Bruce van Voorst/Washington, with other bureaus