The Crash
The mid-air collision took place as the two heart-forming groups passed each other and the heart-piercing aircraft hit them. The piercing aircraft crashed onto the runway and consequently both the fuselage and resulting fireball of aviation fuel tumbled into the spectator area, hitting the crowd and coming to rest against a refrigerated trailer being used to dispense ice cream to the various vendor booths in the area.
At the same time, one of the damaged aircraft from the heart-forming group crashed into the emergency medical evacuation UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, injuring the pilot, Captain Kim Strader. He died weeks later, on Saturday September 17, 1988, at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, from burns he suffered in the accident.
The pilot of the aircraft that hit the helicopter had ejected, but was killed as he hit the runway before his parachute opened. The third aircraft disintegrated in the collision and parts of it were spread along the runway.
After the crash, the remaining aircraft regrouped and landed at Sembach Air Base.
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The Aermacchi hits the ground
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A wall of flames reaches the crowd line
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Chaos immediately after the impact
Read more about this topic: Ramstein Air Show Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word crash:
“You crash over the trees,
you crack the live branch.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919)