Itavia flight 870

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Itavia flight 870
45724 800627 I-TIGI.jpg

I-TIGI, 1972
Accident summary
Accident type 1. Theory: Structural failure after a bomb explosion.
2. Theory: Launch by air-to-air missile
place 80 km north of the island of Ustica
date June 27, 1980
Fatalities 81
Survivors 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type DC-9
operator Itavia
Mark I-TIGI
Departure airport Bologna
Destination airport Palermo
Passengers 77
crew 4th
Lists of aviation accidents
The machine reconstructed from the recovered rubble

On the evening of June 27, 1980, a Douglas DC-9 belonging to the Italian company Aerolinee Itavia with the registration number I-TIGI crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea on Itavia flight 870 north of the Italian island of Ustica on the way from Bologna to Palermo for an initially unexplained cause . All 81 occupants died in what was known in Italy as the "strage di Ustica" (the Ustica bloodbath or massacre).

In 1994, an international technical investigation, including all debris, determined an explosion of an explosive device in the toilet in the rear of the aircraft as the cause of the crash. A person responsible for the explosion was never identified. In 2013, a civil court awarded the victims' relatives compensation because the state "would not have protected the aircraft" and, in contrast to the criminal court in 2007, assumed that it was not a bomb, but a higher probability ( "più probabile che non") about a kill. Due to the investigation that spanned over three decades, Ustica is still a very emotional topic in Italy today.

The events

The aircraft was en route from Bologna to Palermo with flight number IH870. The start was delayed by two hours. At 8:59 p.m. the last transponder signal of the machine was recorded, the active radar echoes disappeared within two minutes.

It was initially considered that the aircraft might have broken apart due to fatigue in the air or that this breakup was caused by a bomb in the machine.

examination

Until 1999, there was no independent aircraft accident investigation authority in Italy, as required by the ICAO . Commissions under the direction of a judge from the penal system were responsible for the investigation.

The fuselage of the aircraft was lifted in 1987 by the manned submarine Nautile of the French semi-public company Ifremer from a depth of 3,500 meters. The flight recorder was only found and recovered in 1991. In the first seven years after the accident, only the 32 largely intact corpses recovered after the accident and seat cushions with fragments in them were available for examination. In 1987/1988, a large part of the rubble was recovered from the three sites that were located apart: the engines had covered the longest distance as compact, massive parts. The fuselage lay a little in front of it and further away, backwards in the direction of flight, the stern of the fuselage with the tail unit had been found.

First expert opinion by Italian commissions in 1989

The so-called Blasi Commission formed for an initial report disbanded in 1990 without having come to a clear conclusion; on the one hand, it was reported in 1989 that the aircraft had been mistakenly shot down by an air-to-air missile . A state commission of inquiry shared this view in the same year. In 1990, a minority of the experts to the conclusion that there will be an explosion by a bomb had come inside the machine. The investigative commission “commissione stragi” of the Italian parliament complained in this connection of false statements and the withholding of information by government agencies. The cockpit voice recorder could be read out by this commission, but the recording ended after half a word at the time in question.

International technical report 1994

Technical report

In 1994 an international technical report came to the conclusion that there was a bomb explosion inside the aircraft, namely in the toilet, which is located on the starboard side in the stern. The engine cowling of the right engine also showed damage on the fuselage side due to fuselage fragments that had penetrated and paint rubbed off from the outside of the fuselage. After some delays, based on the findings and during the ongoing investigation, further wreckage of the upper rear fuselage was salvaged, this in a predicted area; the area resulted from the postulated technical processes and was consistent with them: The first wreckage in the direction of flight had to be those that were at the beginning of the structural failure and the breakup of the aircraft. The search and find area was therefore still in front of the tail unit location, even closer to the explosion site. This search could not be carried out in the entire intended area, as there was no more time for it after the delayed start.

The radar data from the Römer Radar agreed for the breakup with the presumed breakup point due to the location of the rubble. In connection with the presence of other aircraft, the radar experts of the technical investigation calculated not only the very small probability that the radar echoes were false, but also the equally small probability that the presence of an aircraft would cause so few echoes.

The flight data recorder stopped recording at the same time as the voice recorder, there were no data anomalies before the power cut. The two recorders were powered by the starboard engine, which was located in the immediate vicinity of the explosion. The voice recorder had another small "hiccup" recording, which indicated a very brief switchover of the power supply to the port engine before this supply was also lost.

During the second investigation, outside of the technical investigation of the aircraft, it could be proven beyond doubt that military aircraft were in the crash area. At the time of the crash, there were apparently flights by NATO planes and French planes over the Tyrrhenian Sea . Radar data suggest nine fighters.

Overall report

Completely unusual for the foreign members of the technical investigation and in the case of aircraft accident investigations, the report continued to be used as prosecution against named or unnamed persons. They were charged with causing the accident or with withholding information about it. The non-technical members of the commission, chaired by Judge Priore, continued to see a missile as the cause, despite the clear technical result. In the investigation report published in 1999, the examining magistrate Rosario Priore drew the following conclusions from the investigation:

"The incident al DC-9 è occorso a seguito di azione militare di intercettamento, il DC-9 è stato abbattuto."

"The DC-9 crashed after a military interception operation, the DC-9 was shot down."

However, the nationality of the aircraft that should have fired the missile remained unclear. As a result, Priore initiated several trials against nine officers - including four generals - of the Italian Air Force and the Italian secret service SIOS-Aeronautica . The charge was, among other things, high treason , since Priore assessed the events of June 27, 1980 as "atto di guerra", ie as an act of war against the Republic of Italy. The prosecution collapsed due to a lack of evidence. However, the judge wrote a book on the subject, which various alternative theories refer to.

Italian court judgments

In 2007, a criminal division of the Italian Supreme Court, Corte Suprema di Cassazione , acquitted the defendant Air Force generals because they believed there had been an explosion on board.

A civil division of the same court ruled on January 28, 2013 in a “diametrically opposed” judgment that the Italian state had to pay 110 million euros in damages to the bereaved because of an air battle, without naming the perpetrator. In September 2011 a civil court in Palermo had ruled as the first instance that the Italian government had to pay 100 million euros in damages to the relatives of the 81 people who died. The ruling was based on the fact that the Ministries of Transport and Defense had contributed to the crash through negligence and omission and had hindered the investigation for years.

Theories about a launch

Shot down by air-to-air missile

Several sources believe that the DC-9 was shot down by an air-to-air missile and that on the evening of June 27, an aerial battle between two Libyan Air Force MiGs and a group of NATO fighters broke out over the Tyrrhenian Sea . Therefore, the proponents of this theory focused on the question of what nationality the NATO aircraft involved could have been, how the air combat came about and which aircraft would have fired the air-to-air missile.

In the case of a Libyan MiG-23MS that crashed in the Calabrian Sila Mountains, which was discovered and recovered on July 18, 1980, the autopsy report determined the degree of decomposition of the pilot's body, which made a death around June 27 appear possible. This would include a theoretical possibility that a Libyan plane was flying south over Italy that day. Another possibility is that the pilot of the plane was one of 40 Syrian pilots who were being trained at the Libyan base in Benina at the time. As a result of a leaking oxygen mask , he lost consciousness while flying at high altitude, and the autopilot kept the aircraft in the air until it crashed over southern Italy after all of its fuel had been consumed.

Despite years of investigation and cooperation by NATO, it is only a guess that

  • there could have been an aerial battle near Ustica on the evening of June 27th
  • two Libyan MiG-23s could have been involved, one of which crashed in Calabria
  • five NATO fighters were underway over the Tyrrhenian Sea at the time in question
  • two of them were French Mirage fighters and
  • on the orders of higher officials, all radar records from Italian radar stations for the period in question had been destroyed.

Theory: Attack attempt on Gaddafi

According to one theory, the DC-9 got caught in a French or American attack on the government machine of the then Libyan head of state Muammar al-Gaddafi , which was probably a Tupolev Tu-134 remotely similar to the DC-9 . At that time Gaddafi was on his way to a state visit to Poland . It is alleged that several interceptors were launched from a French or American aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean or from a French or American base (Solenzara, NAS Sigonella ) in order to shoot down Gaddafi's machine while it was crossing the Tyrrhenian Sea. However, Libya learned of the plans of the French or the Americans through a contact in Rome and diverted the machine via Malta . At the same time, some MiG-23s were ordered to protect Gaddafi in the Italian airspace of the distant Tyrrhenian Sea. In an air battle between the MiGs and the French or American aircraft, Flight 870, which took off two hours late, was accidentally shot down because the French or American pilots assumed that the aircraft flying south was Gaddafi's aircraft on the way to Poland, but at the same time not an attack on Gaddafi, but on the fighter planes flying from Yugoslavia to Libya. France would have had a dispute with Italy because of the conflict between Libya and Chad over their border area, which may be rich in natural resources.

Theory: Transfer flight to Libya

A second theory of how the fateful air battle came about is that two Libyan MiG-23s, or one intended for Libya, were on their way from Yugoslavia to Libya. After crossing the Adriatic Sea at low altitude and thereby flying under the Italian radar network, the two MiGs tried to get undetected from Bologna to Palermo in the radar shadow of the DC-9. When the DC-9 crossed the path of two F-104 Starfighters from Aeronautica Militare over Tuscany on its approach to the Grosseto military airfield , the instructors Nutarelli and Naldini, who flew the two-seat trainer version of the Starfighter TF-104G, discovered two MiGs should. The two triggered air alarms twice at 8:24 p.m. and then returned to their base in compliance with radio silence . However, since Italy tacitly tolerated such overflights of Libyan aircraft and even provided funds to build and maintain the Libyan air force, while former military pilots trained Libyan pilots, the instructors and their student pilots landed at the Grosseto base at 8:50 p.m. as planned.

Theories: Several Libyan MiGs in Italy fighting against each other

According to two other theories, Italy not only allowed overflights of Libyan military aircraft on their way to Yugoslavia or back to Libya, they would also have been given an airfield for stopovers, possibly the military airfield at San Pancrazio Salentino in Puglia with a 1,300 Meter long slope.

A Libyan pilot (or a mercenary), who was secretly politically against the revolutionary leader, was planned for an attack on Gaddafi's government machine, which was allegedly planned by NATO countries. For this purpose, a MiG-23 followed Itavia's DC-9 in its radar shadow to the south. When Gaddafi found out about the attack through the aforementioned contact in Rome, he is said to have given Libyan pilots loyal to the regime the order to use their MiG-23s to attack the breakaway pilots coming from the north. During this counterattack, not only the breakaway MiG but also the Itavia DC-9 were badly damaged, most likely by training missiles. Flight captain Domenico Gatti succeeded in landing the DC-9 near Ustica. In order to cover up the incident and the international conspiracy, the search and rescue services were deliberately alerted with considerable delay and then deployed in other places, in the hope that the DC-9, along with passengers and crew members, would sink into the sea more than 3000 meters deep here . The renegade pilot's MiG had crashed, a MiG-23 flying under Gaddafi's control would have been shot down in the deep flight in the Sila Mountains of Calabria, "probably" by an F-14 of the US Navy , according to Sandro Bruni and Gabriele Moroni.

The version voiced by the flight commander's brother would be simpler, according to which several MiGs were on their way from Libya, with two aircraft chasing a deserted pilot.

Deaths linked by proponents of a launch theory

A series of deaths of members of the Italian Air Force sparked rumors of a conspiracy to remove those involved and those who knew about it .

  • On August 8, 1980, Colonel Pierangelo Tedoldi died in a traffic accident. Tedoldi was nominated as the successor to the commander of the Grosseto Air Force Base , Colonel Nicola Tacchio. However, at the time of his death he had not yet taken up his command. On this basis, the interceptor landed on the evening of June 27th with the pilots Nutarelli and Naldini, who had previously crossed the path of the DC-9 near Florence.
  • On May 9, 1981, Captain Maurizio Gari died of heart failure. He was 37 years old. On the night of June 27, Gari was one of three officers in the radar station of Poggio balloons at Grosseto.
  • On January 23, 1983, the mayor of Grosseto, Giovanni Battista Finetti, was killed in a car accident. He had learned from Air Force officers that on the evening of June 27th two interceptors had taken off from the nearby airfield to shoot down a Libyan MiG.
  • On March 20, 1987, the Air Force General and Head of Department in the Ministry of Defense, Licio Giorgeri , who was in a Piaggio PD.808 , a special aircraft for electronic warfare, over Ustica on the night of the crash, was shot dead by a terrorist squad called Unione combattenti comunisti . It was later discovered that the head of the homicide squad had been paid by the Interior Ministry.
  • On March 30, 1987, Sergeant Alberto Dettori was found hanged from a tree. On the night of June 27th to 28th, he was one of the officers on duty at the Poggio Ballone radar station.
  • On August 28, 1988, the above-mentioned pilots Ivo Nutarelli and Mario Naldini died in the Ramstein flight conference accident . A week after the Ramstein accident, the two pilots should have testified to the committee of inquiry into Itavia flight 870. However, given the link to the Ustica crash and the numerous other deaths associated with it, some, including Elmar Giemulla , a lawyer and aviation law expert, suspect that the accident was in fact sabotage.
  • On February 1, 1991, Air Force Sergeant Antonio Muzio was shot. In 1980 he worked for the Lamezia Terme radar system.
  • On February 2, 1992, Air Force Sergeant Antonio Pagliara died in a car accident. He was employed at the Otranto radar facility in 1980 .
  • On February 2, 1992, the secret service officer Sandro Marcucci, who was on duty on the evening of June 27, 1980, crashed in a sports plane before being questioned.
  • On January 12, 1993, Air Force General Roberto Boemio was stabbed to death in Brussels by unknown perpetrators. The now retired officer was the commander of the regional operations center in Martina Franca on the evening of June 27, 1980 and was considered an important witness.
  • On December 21, 1995, Franco Parisi was found hanged from a tree. He was employed at the Otranto radar facility in 1980 and had received a summons to testify in court a few days earlier.

Other events

Napolitano's opinion

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary on June 27, 2010, Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano called for the accident to be clarified. Napolitano said: "There are traces of a conspiracy, in the case of Ustica perhaps also an international intrigue, which we must recall." Francesco Cossiga , one of his predecessors in office, had ironically warned journalists a month earlier that they should stop their research on the 30th anniversary of the Ustica crash, it is better to operate abroad, otherwise something could happen to them, such as food poisoning or a collision with a truck.

Voice recording disappeared

In January 2013, Italian media reported the disappearance of the tape with the voice recordings of Itavia flight 870.

museum

A museum to commemorate the Ustica disaster opened in Bologna in 2007. Aircraft parts with an installation by Christian Boltanski will be exhibited . On the occasion of the opening, the work Ultimo Volo - The Last Flight by the Italian songwriter Pippo Pollina was premiered.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ustica Bartolucci e Dreyfus , L'Occidentale, March 4, 2020
  2. ↑ Ustica, Cassazione: “Ministeri della Difesa e delle Infrastrutture risarciscano Itavia. Appello decida se bastano 265 milioni ” , ilfattoquotidiano.it, 6 December 2018
  3. ↑ a b c d e A. Frank Taylor: A case history involving wreckage analysis. (pdf, 1.3 MB) Cranfield University, October 1998, accessed on February 27, 2020 .
  4. ^ Barbara McMahon: The Mystery of Flight 870. In: The Guardian . July 21, 2006, accessed April 25, 2011 .
  5. ↑ a b Ustica, caccia e portaerei Usa. Dopo 34 anni Parigi conferma. In: L'Unità . June 25, 2014, archived from the original on September 4, 2014 ; accessed on February 27, 2020 (Italian).
  6. ↑ After 33 years: Ustica crash officially "shot down by rocket". In: Austrian Wings. January 29, 2013, accessed February 27, 2020 . Michael Braun: Ustica plane crash in 1980: collapse of the Lies building. In: taz.de . January 29, 2013, accessed February 27, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Hit by missile during aerial combat. In: ORF . January 29, 2013, accessed February 27, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Plane crash: Italy has to pay 100 million. In: DiePresse.com . September 12, 2011, accessed September 13, 2011 . Ustica, ministeri condannati 100 milioni a favore dei familiari. In: La Repubblica . September 12, 2011, accessed February 27, 2020 (Italian).
  9. ↑ Tom Cooper , Chuck Canyon, Albert Grandolini: Libya's Air Force: from King Idris to Colonel Gaddafi. In: Flieger Revue Extra No. 29, p. 19.
  10. ↑ Luigi Spezia: Il giudice: “Francesi a caccia di Gheddafi”. In: La Repubblica. June 27, 2010, accessed February 28, 2020 (Italian).
  11. ↑ a b Stefan Troendle: What happened to flight 870? In: tagesschau.de. June 26, 2010; Archived from the original on June 29, 2010 ; accessed on February 28, 2020 .
  12. ^ A b Daniele Protti, Sandro Provvisionato: Nemico, ti insegno a uccidere. (pdf, 217 kB) In: L'Europeo July 29 , 1990, pp. 21–23 , archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; Retrieved February 28, 2020 (reproduced on stragi80.it).
  13. ^ Sandro Bruni, Gabriele Moroni: Ustica - la tragedia e l'imbroglio. Memoria & Pellegrini, Cosenza 2003.
    Sandro Provvisionato: Una breccia nel muro di gomma. (pdf, 167 kB) In: L'Europeo July 27 , 1993, pp. 13–15 , archived from the original on May 12, 2006 ; Retrieved February 28, 2020 (Italian, reproduced on stragi80.it).
  14. ↑ a b Tiziano Soresina: Ustica, sparito il nastro con le ultime parole di Gatti. In: Gazzetta di Reggio. January 30, 2013, accessed February 27, 2020 (Italian).
  15. ↑ a b c Jens Bauszus: The Ustica case: Was Ramstein a murder plot? In: Focus Online . August 27, 2008, accessed February 28, 2020 .
  16. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Ustica: strage di guerra in tempo di pace. In: Senza Soste. March 6, 2011, accessed February 28, 2020 (Italian).
  17. ↑ a b c d Background: Dead witnesses. In: young world . October 4, 2011, accessed February 28, 2020 .
  18. ↑ Hartmut Jatzko: Follow-up group for the victims and survivors of the Ramstein air day disaster. In: ppis.de. 1997, archived from the original on April 14, 2015 ; accessed on February 28, 2020 (from sub-item “Glimmer of Hope”).
  19. ↑ Il Museo. Museo per la Memoria di Ustica, accessed February 28, 2020 (Italian).
  20. ↑ Ultimo Volo - The last flight. Theaterhaus Stuttgart , accessed on February 28, 2020 .