Ramstein Air Show Disaster

The Ramstein air show disaster is the second-deadliest air show incident (following that in 2002 at Sknyliv). It took place in front of about 300,000 people on Sunday 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. 67 spectators and 3 pilots died, 346 spectators sustained serious injuries in the resulting explosion and fire.

Read more about Ramstein Air Show Disaster:  Background, The Crash, Timeline, Emergency Response, Investigation, References in Popular Culture

Famous quotes containing the words air, show and/or disaster:

    “Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “In dreaming,
    The clouds methought would open, and show riches
    Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
    I cried to dream again.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect—this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they’re not critical to a culture’s existence.”
    —Twyla Tharp (b. 1941)