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:
“Crash on crash of the sea,
straining to wreck men, sea-boards, continents,
raging against the world, furious.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)