DownwardDog
Riding a Brompton with a power meter.
There are 1,400psi hydraulic lines in a Harrier wing so you'd have to be insane to fire a sidearm through one and if you did you'd end up in jail no matter who you are.
Cold War Aviation Porn
- Thread starter JuanTwoThree
- Start date
There are 1,400psi hydraulic lines in a Harrier wing so you'd have to be insane to fire a sidearm through one and if you did you'd end up in jail no matter who you are.
gosub
~#
I wasn't there, my Dad believed him, (this was before his stroke) which in those days usually meant it was true.
gosub
~#
Test pilot earned his money : jets and delta wing on a seaplane
T & P
|-o-| (-o-) |-o-|
This could have as well been posted in the General Aviation news thread, but (sorry, spoiler alert), it also fits in this thread for reasons that will become obvious. I wasn't even aware of this crash, let alone the mystery surrounding it, and most astonishingly, its likely cause, but it is definitely worth a read. Suffice to say that it involves NATO black ops, MIG-23s, and plots to assassinate a head of State.
www.telegraph.co.uk
Full text below, as this is behind the Telegraph paywall
The incredible tale of Flight 870, Italian aviation's darkest secret
What happened to Flight 870 to pluck it so brutally from the sky 40 years ago?
It is no grand overstatement to say that Italy has endured a terrible 2020. It was the first European epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic; it has been one of the countries worst hit by the virus – with, to date, more than 65,000 deaths. So there should be scant surprise that a major anniversary of one of its saddest stories passed almost without comment a few months ago. In a year of tragedy, who needs to scratch at old scars and dwell on historic sorrows? And yet, there will have been plenty of Italians who will have looked to the sky amid the warmth of mid-summer, and cast their minds back 40 years to the events of June 27 1980. Or, at least, to what little they definitively know about that dreadful day.
It takes about an hour and a half to fly from Bologna, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, to Palermo, its counterpart on Sicily. But in many ways, Itavia Flight 870 has been in the air for four decades now. That it never reached the island at the tip of Italy’s geographical boot is obviously crucial, and yet strangely incidental, to its bleak tale. Flight 870 might as well still be flying, so prominent a position does it occupy in the Italian consciousness as an unresolved mystery and a dark conspiracy. That it is best known not by its number, but by the emotive phrase “Strage di Ustica” – “the Ustica massacre”, in reference to the islet, some 40 miles north of Palermo, close to which it disappeared into the Tyrrhenian Sea at one minute to nine in the evening – rather sums up the anger its memory provokes.
It should, of course, have been a simple journey; an early-bird dash to the beach ahead of the busier sands of the imminent school holidays. A swift hop through the heat of a long Friday. The aircraft being readied by Aerolinee Itavia as the afternoon progressed (a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15) was not some shiny new model – but, with just 14 years of use under its wings since its construction in 1966, it was hardly a creaking relic either. And it was utterly ordinary. In fact, the only semi-interesting asterisk above its departure from Bologna’s Guglielmo Marconi Airport was that, when it left the runway, at 8.08pm – with 77 passengers and four crew members inside – it was one hour and 53 minutes late.
The first half-hour of the flight was unremarkable. At 8.37pm, Captain Domenico Gatti spoke to air traffic control, confirming that the plane had completed its passage across the Italian mainland, and was now above the sea. This would be the last uncontested message from the cockpit. What followed was silence – but a silence which has continued to echo.
Seven years later, on June 6 1987, when the contents of the black box recorder were finally due to be released after what had seemed to be endless prevarication and official avoiding of the question, Italian newspaper La Repubblica repeated a rumour that Gatti’s last statement was strange. “Ci sono tante luci che mi pare un cimitero,” he was reported as having said. In effect – “there are so many lights that it seems to me to be a cemetery”.
What did he mean by this, the paper asked? This fragment of “conversation” would be contradicted by the formal transcript from the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) – which amounted to nothing more than a partial word, possibly “guarda!” (“look!”), before the power cut out. But ear-catching scenarios had become commonplace as Italy had sought a truth that had refused to be found. Thirty-three years later, the picture is only partially clearer. The one undeniable certainty is that, at 8.59pm, Flight 870 broke apart in mid-air. One minute later, two Italian F-104 jets were scrambled from Grosseto Air Force Base in Tuscany – but poor visibility hampered the search. It would not be until the following morning that wreckage, and bodies, were spotted on the surface. There were no survivors.
What had happened to Flight 870 to pluck it so brutally from a summer sky? One theory would never be too far from the discussion as the authorities began – literally – to pick up the pieces. The incident occurred at the start of the Eighties – a decade when commercial planes seemed to fall from the heavens and into the headlines on a monthly basis; a time when airport security was, at best, inconsistent. Could there have been a bomb on board?
This was a perfectly logical suggestion. In 1980, Italy was still in the midst of the “Anni di Piombo” (Years of Lead), a grim two-decade period (usually deemed to run from 1968 to 1988) of domestic terrorism that saw extremist groups from both the right and left attack targets that were usually on the mainland, and generally in the north of the country. Significantly, these included Bologna’s central railway station, which was struck by a bomb, planted by the neo-fascist group the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR) in what would be the deadliest event of the period – killing 85 people, and wounding more than 200. It occurred on the morning of August 2 1980 – six weeks after the loss of Flight 870.
The bomb theory would be chased, at various paces, for more than a decade. Public interest in the incident – as well as detailed radar knowledge of where the plane had been at the moment of disappearance – meant that large sections of its remains were brought up from the seabed as the Eighties continued, particularly in 1987 and 1988. Various “commissions” were empowered to weigh and measure the evidence. The fourth, the “Blasi Commission”, released its findings in 1990, but was unable to agree on a cause. A fifth, the “Priore Commission” – named after Dr Rosario Priore, the judge to whom it would report – was given licence to proceed in the September of the same year. Unlike its predecessors, this enquiry widened the scope of its expertise beyond Italy, bringing in aviation professionals from Sweden, Germany and the UK. The latter contingent included Frank Taylor – an air-accident specialist with significant experience and an eye for detail.
Given access to the DC-9-15’s broken fuselage – which had been salvaged so extensively that the jigsaw had been pieced slowly back together on a dummy framework – Taylor became a proponent of the idea that the aircraft had been destroyed by a bomb, probably concealed in the rear toilet, and possibly hidden out of sight in the tissue holder. “The explosion caused local damage and, as a result of both the elevated pressure and shock waves, blew the toilet walls outwards in all directions,” he would write in a summary of the incident. The plane, he continued, would have been ripped apart in no more than five seconds – and dramatically so in the first two. “Within about two seconds, most of the top skin [of the fuselage] above the window belts on the port side [would have gone],” he stated, adding that “on the starboard side, [another section] had come off, together with internal parts, including the basin, toilet door hinge and jamb, cushions – and passengers.”
These, roughly, were the findings that were presented to the Priore Commission in the November of 1994. They were dismissed by the judge as “unusable”; partly, Taylor wrote, because he believed Italian investigators were now fixated on an even darker turn of events – and “were not prepared, even to consider, that there was another explanation.”
Contd. below (too long a post otherwise)
The incredible tale of Flight 870, Italian aviation's darkest secret
What happened to Flight 870 to pluck it so brutally from the sky 40 years ago?
www.telegraph.co.uk
Full text below, as this is behind the Telegraph paywall
The incredible tale of Flight 870, Italian aviation's darkest secret
What happened to Flight 870 to pluck it so brutally from the sky 40 years ago?
It is no grand overstatement to say that Italy has endured a terrible 2020. It was the first European epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic; it has been one of the countries worst hit by the virus – with, to date, more than 65,000 deaths. So there should be scant surprise that a major anniversary of one of its saddest stories passed almost without comment a few months ago. In a year of tragedy, who needs to scratch at old scars and dwell on historic sorrows? And yet, there will have been plenty of Italians who will have looked to the sky amid the warmth of mid-summer, and cast their minds back 40 years to the events of June 27 1980. Or, at least, to what little they definitively know about that dreadful day.
It takes about an hour and a half to fly from Bologna, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, to Palermo, its counterpart on Sicily. But in many ways, Itavia Flight 870 has been in the air for four decades now. That it never reached the island at the tip of Italy’s geographical boot is obviously crucial, and yet strangely incidental, to its bleak tale. Flight 870 might as well still be flying, so prominent a position does it occupy in the Italian consciousness as an unresolved mystery and a dark conspiracy. That it is best known not by its number, but by the emotive phrase “Strage di Ustica” – “the Ustica massacre”, in reference to the islet, some 40 miles north of Palermo, close to which it disappeared into the Tyrrhenian Sea at one minute to nine in the evening – rather sums up the anger its memory provokes.
It should, of course, have been a simple journey; an early-bird dash to the beach ahead of the busier sands of the imminent school holidays. A swift hop through the heat of a long Friday. The aircraft being readied by Aerolinee Itavia as the afternoon progressed (a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15) was not some shiny new model – but, with just 14 years of use under its wings since its construction in 1966, it was hardly a creaking relic either. And it was utterly ordinary. In fact, the only semi-interesting asterisk above its departure from Bologna’s Guglielmo Marconi Airport was that, when it left the runway, at 8.08pm – with 77 passengers and four crew members inside – it was one hour and 53 minutes late.
The first half-hour of the flight was unremarkable. At 8.37pm, Captain Domenico Gatti spoke to air traffic control, confirming that the plane had completed its passage across the Italian mainland, and was now above the sea. This would be the last uncontested message from the cockpit. What followed was silence – but a silence which has continued to echo.
Seven years later, on June 6 1987, when the contents of the black box recorder were finally due to be released after what had seemed to be endless prevarication and official avoiding of the question, Italian newspaper La Repubblica repeated a rumour that Gatti’s last statement was strange. “Ci sono tante luci che mi pare un cimitero,” he was reported as having said. In effect – “there are so many lights that it seems to me to be a cemetery”.
What did he mean by this, the paper asked? This fragment of “conversation” would be contradicted by the formal transcript from the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) – which amounted to nothing more than a partial word, possibly “guarda!” (“look!”), before the power cut out. But ear-catching scenarios had become commonplace as Italy had sought a truth that had refused to be found. Thirty-three years later, the picture is only partially clearer. The one undeniable certainty is that, at 8.59pm, Flight 870 broke apart in mid-air. One minute later, two Italian F-104 jets were scrambled from Grosseto Air Force Base in Tuscany – but poor visibility hampered the search. It would not be until the following morning that wreckage, and bodies, were spotted on the surface. There were no survivors.
What had happened to Flight 870 to pluck it so brutally from a summer sky? One theory would never be too far from the discussion as the authorities began – literally – to pick up the pieces. The incident occurred at the start of the Eighties – a decade when commercial planes seemed to fall from the heavens and into the headlines on a monthly basis; a time when airport security was, at best, inconsistent. Could there have been a bomb on board?
This was a perfectly logical suggestion. In 1980, Italy was still in the midst of the “Anni di Piombo” (Years of Lead), a grim two-decade period (usually deemed to run from 1968 to 1988) of domestic terrorism that saw extremist groups from both the right and left attack targets that were usually on the mainland, and generally in the north of the country. Significantly, these included Bologna’s central railway station, which was struck by a bomb, planted by the neo-fascist group the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR) in what would be the deadliest event of the period – killing 85 people, and wounding more than 200. It occurred on the morning of August 2 1980 – six weeks after the loss of Flight 870.
The bomb theory would be chased, at various paces, for more than a decade. Public interest in the incident – as well as detailed radar knowledge of where the plane had been at the moment of disappearance – meant that large sections of its remains were brought up from the seabed as the Eighties continued, particularly in 1987 and 1988. Various “commissions” were empowered to weigh and measure the evidence. The fourth, the “Blasi Commission”, released its findings in 1990, but was unable to agree on a cause. A fifth, the “Priore Commission” – named after Dr Rosario Priore, the judge to whom it would report – was given licence to proceed in the September of the same year. Unlike its predecessors, this enquiry widened the scope of its expertise beyond Italy, bringing in aviation professionals from Sweden, Germany and the UK. The latter contingent included Frank Taylor – an air-accident specialist with significant experience and an eye for detail.
Given access to the DC-9-15’s broken fuselage – which had been salvaged so extensively that the jigsaw had been pieced slowly back together on a dummy framework – Taylor became a proponent of the idea that the aircraft had been destroyed by a bomb, probably concealed in the rear toilet, and possibly hidden out of sight in the tissue holder. “The explosion caused local damage and, as a result of both the elevated pressure and shock waves, blew the toilet walls outwards in all directions,” he would write in a summary of the incident. The plane, he continued, would have been ripped apart in no more than five seconds – and dramatically so in the first two. “Within about two seconds, most of the top skin [of the fuselage] above the window belts on the port side [would have gone],” he stated, adding that “on the starboard side, [another section] had come off, together with internal parts, including the basin, toilet door hinge and jamb, cushions – and passengers.”
These, roughly, were the findings that were presented to the Priore Commission in the November of 1994. They were dismissed by the judge as “unusable”; partly, Taylor wrote, because he believed Italian investigators were now fixated on an even darker turn of events – and “were not prepared, even to consider, that there was another explanation.”
Contd. below (too long a post otherwise)
T & P
|-o-| (-o-) |-o-|
(Last bit)
Of course, for all Taylor’s certainty, there are holes that can be poked, clearly and easily, into the bomb theory. The first was the near-two-hour lateness in the flight’s departure. A device with a timer that had been set for a moment when the plane was likely to be at cruising altitude would, thanks to the delay, have exploded while it was still at the gate in Bologna. And because the delay was longer than the scheduled flight time, had a bomb really been intended to detonate in the precise minute of disaster – 8.59pm – the DC-9-15 would already have been on the tarmac in Palermo, and empty of passengers and crew, if it had taken off on time. A suicide bomber, triggering a device by hand? Possibly, but this was not the modus operandi of any of the extremist groups active in Italy during the Anni di Piombo. Moreover, and most significantly, no terror organisation would take “credit” for the atrocity – an impossibility in an awful era where each death was lifted as a trophy.
So what of – to scroll back one paragraph – that “even darker turn of events”? The one on which Italian investigators were apparently fixated. What if the flight had been destroyed, not by an explosive planted within it – but by a weapon that had pierced it, from without?
The suggestion that a military strike had downed the plane had gained momentum over time. The mutterings were many. Why were two F-104s scrambled within a minute of the aircraft’s vanishing from the radar? What did the Italian Air Force know? It was this undercurrent of suspicion that La Repubblica was tacitly playing to with in its pre-emptive mis-reporting of Captain Gatti’s purported last words; this that was at the heart of the term “Ustica massacre”. Flight 870 – opinion had come to mumble, as enquiry after enquiry had come and gone – was a victim not of terrorism, but of the unseen hand of an international power. Perhaps it was a “friend” acting inadvertently; perhaps a foe with malign intent. But whoever they were, they were responsible for the killings of 81 people.
A parliamentary commission in 1989 put some of this into words, talking of “an act of war; a de facto unreported war”. But it would be a further 10 years before this accusation was brought properly out into the light. Finally, a torch was shone by Dr Rosario Priore, who having discarded the findings of Frank Taylor and his fellow investigators in 1994, would, in 1999, sign off a report announcing that his attempts to uncover the facts had been blocked by a wall of obstruction – in what amounted to a two-decade-long cover-up.
Of what? Priore – who was, and remains, one of Italy’s most respected legal figures – suggested that Flight 870 had been caught up in a dogfight between military jets. At best, he theorised, it had swerved to avoid a collision with a warplane, and been unable to right itself. At worst, it had been sent to its end, either mistakenly or maliciously, by a missile.
Fired by whom? Here is where things get murkier still. Radar evidence had revealed that several military aircraft had been in the skies above the Tyrrhenian Sea on the evening that Flight 870 had been trundling blithely towards Palermo. These may have included Italian, French, and American jets – as well, Priore suggested, as Libyan military muscle.
He outlined a scenario that sounds like an implausible sequence from an espionage movie – the sort of narrative twist that might be left on the editing suite floor as too far-fetched. But here it was, being sketched out by a high-ranking judge. Flight 870 – Priore said he now believed – had unknowingly stumbled into a NATO black-ops mission to assassinate a world leader. And not just any leader. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s dictator – the enfant terrible of the Eighties political arena; a man who has been widely implicated in terror plots and attempts to destabilise European governments. It was he, Priore’s report implied, who had been the target of an operation that had gone badly wrong. The report added that no-one could be certain of the exact sequence of events – but there was a fair chance that Flight 870 had been shot down by a pilot who believed it was Gaddafi’s plane.
The unconfirmed theory that has since developed goes something like this: On that June day, secret-service agents – possibly French – had learned that Gaddafi would be flying back to Libya across the Mediterranean. Here was an unmissable opportunity to remove a figure who was proving problematic – and to have him crash into the sea in what would appear to be an accident. A host of warplanes – possibly French, Italian and American – would be lying in wait for him as he passed down Italy’s west coast. All that was required was patience – and a sure shot. The assassins would be gone before Gaddafi hit the water.
However, the theory continues, Gaddafi was tipped off as to his peril, and opted to divert his Tupolev jet to Malta. But this news did not reach his would-be killers – nor Ezedin Koal, the Libyan pilot of a MiG-23, who had been dispatched north from Tripoli to rendezvous with his leader, and escort him home. It was he who first spotted Flight 870, approaching the north coast of Sicily, roughly where Gaddafi’s Tupolev should have been – and heading in the correct direction. Mis-identifying it in the failing light, he circled it, then fell into step with it. All this happened under the wolfish gaze of what may have been up to nine hostile aircraft – who watched the MiG-23’s manoeuvre, and took it as confirmation that their quarry had arrived. The button was pushed; Flight 870 was ripped apart as it a fist had been punched through wallpaper. All that was left now was to deal with the witness. Koal, realising that he was in a desperate position, tried to flee, but was harried to his doom, crashing into the Sila Mountains in Calabria, on the Italian mainland.
Is there any evidence that any of this happened? Yes, but on a purely circumstantial basis.
For one thing, there was a body. On July 18 1980, three weeks after Flight 870’s demise, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG-23 – along with the corpse of its pilot, badly decomposed in the sticky heat of summer – was found near the Calabrian village of Castelsilano. In October 2011, once Gaddafi had been lynched by his own people, a cache of secret files was unearthed in Tripoli. It identified Koal as the dead MiG-23 pilot – and outlined the theory detailed above; the assassination attempt, the awful mistake, the hiding of the trail.
An unreliable record? Absolutely. To subscribe to a theory solely on the word of Libyan intelligence would be wildly irresponsible. But other shreds of evidence lend it a certain amount of plausibility. Filing his report in 1999, Priore complained that he had been deliberately hindered by the Italian military and secret service in a conspiracy of silence that went all the way up the chain of command to NATO. Four Italian Air Force generals and five other officials would subsequently be charged with high treason and perjury. The charges would be denied, but the cases would go to court. Two of the generals were found not guilty in April 2004; the other cases collapsed due to lack of evidence and time – Italy’s statute of limitations is 10 years; it had been 24 since Flight 870 went down. Further appeals and rulings, in 2005 and 2007, ensured that all four generals were fully acquitted.
And that seemed to be that. Until 2008, that is, when the former Italian president Francesco Cossiga – whose earlier spell as prime minister had run from August 1979 to October 1980 – went on national television to point the finger at Paris. He had been told by Italian secret service agents, he said, that Flight 870 had been shot down by a French warplane. He would provide no further details, and would die in 2010, but his admission was enough for another official investigation into the disaster to be opened, in June 2008.
It would take three more years for there to be any further progress. In September 2011, a civil tribunal in Palermo ordered the Italian government to pay €100million (£86 million by the conversion rate of the time) to the families of the victims of Flight 870 – stating that it had failed to protect the aircraft and its passengers, concealed the truth, and destroyed evidence. The ruling would be upheld, following an appeal, in 2015. Two years earlier, in January 2013, Italy’s Supreme Court had finally taken a stance and gone on record – declaring that it was “abundantly” clear that the flight had been struck by a missile, and announcing that the country’s Ministries of Defence and Transport were obliged to compensate the bereaved. It stopped short of saying who had pulled the trigger.
Perhaps that will never be revealed – although the victims’ families have been unstinting in their calls for full disclosure. “We still hope the truth will come out,” Daria Bonfietti – who lost her brother in the disaster – told the Guardian in 2006. “We know that, very probably, the plane was struck down by a missile. Too many people have been keeping this secret for too long, but we will not give up until we know everything that happened.”
She was speaking as Flight 870 travelled its last few miles. For almost two decades, the fragmented DC-9-15 had been sitting in a hangar in Rome, where investigators could probe its broken body for clues. But now, it was being transferred back to Bologna on a phalanx of lorries, wrapped in plastic that might as well have been a shroud. On June 27 2007, it would be unveiled as a memorial-cum exhibit at the Museo per la Memoria di Ustica (Museum for the Memory of Ustica; museomemoriaustica.it), a corpse frozen in its dying moment; its death incontrovertible, but the whodunnit still officially unresolved.
Of course, for all Taylor’s certainty, there are holes that can be poked, clearly and easily, into the bomb theory. The first was the near-two-hour lateness in the flight’s departure. A device with a timer that had been set for a moment when the plane was likely to be at cruising altitude would, thanks to the delay, have exploded while it was still at the gate in Bologna. And because the delay was longer than the scheduled flight time, had a bomb really been intended to detonate in the precise minute of disaster – 8.59pm – the DC-9-15 would already have been on the tarmac in Palermo, and empty of passengers and crew, if it had taken off on time. A suicide bomber, triggering a device by hand? Possibly, but this was not the modus operandi of any of the extremist groups active in Italy during the Anni di Piombo. Moreover, and most significantly, no terror organisation would take “credit” for the atrocity – an impossibility in an awful era where each death was lifted as a trophy.
So what of – to scroll back one paragraph – that “even darker turn of events”? The one on which Italian investigators were apparently fixated. What if the flight had been destroyed, not by an explosive planted within it – but by a weapon that had pierced it, from without?
The suggestion that a military strike had downed the plane had gained momentum over time. The mutterings were many. Why were two F-104s scrambled within a minute of the aircraft’s vanishing from the radar? What did the Italian Air Force know? It was this undercurrent of suspicion that La Repubblica was tacitly playing to with in its pre-emptive mis-reporting of Captain Gatti’s purported last words; this that was at the heart of the term “Ustica massacre”. Flight 870 – opinion had come to mumble, as enquiry after enquiry had come and gone – was a victim not of terrorism, but of the unseen hand of an international power. Perhaps it was a “friend” acting inadvertently; perhaps a foe with malign intent. But whoever they were, they were responsible for the killings of 81 people.
A parliamentary commission in 1989 put some of this into words, talking of “an act of war; a de facto unreported war”. But it would be a further 10 years before this accusation was brought properly out into the light. Finally, a torch was shone by Dr Rosario Priore, who having discarded the findings of Frank Taylor and his fellow investigators in 1994, would, in 1999, sign off a report announcing that his attempts to uncover the facts had been blocked by a wall of obstruction – in what amounted to a two-decade-long cover-up.
Of what? Priore – who was, and remains, one of Italy’s most respected legal figures – suggested that Flight 870 had been caught up in a dogfight between military jets. At best, he theorised, it had swerved to avoid a collision with a warplane, and been unable to right itself. At worst, it had been sent to its end, either mistakenly or maliciously, by a missile.
Fired by whom? Here is where things get murkier still. Radar evidence had revealed that several military aircraft had been in the skies above the Tyrrhenian Sea on the evening that Flight 870 had been trundling blithely towards Palermo. These may have included Italian, French, and American jets – as well, Priore suggested, as Libyan military muscle.
He outlined a scenario that sounds like an implausible sequence from an espionage movie – the sort of narrative twist that might be left on the editing suite floor as too far-fetched. But here it was, being sketched out by a high-ranking judge. Flight 870 – Priore said he now believed – had unknowingly stumbled into a NATO black-ops mission to assassinate a world leader. And not just any leader. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s dictator – the enfant terrible of the Eighties political arena; a man who has been widely implicated in terror plots and attempts to destabilise European governments. It was he, Priore’s report implied, who had been the target of an operation that had gone badly wrong. The report added that no-one could be certain of the exact sequence of events – but there was a fair chance that Flight 870 had been shot down by a pilot who believed it was Gaddafi’s plane.
The unconfirmed theory that has since developed goes something like this: On that June day, secret-service agents – possibly French – had learned that Gaddafi would be flying back to Libya across the Mediterranean. Here was an unmissable opportunity to remove a figure who was proving problematic – and to have him crash into the sea in what would appear to be an accident. A host of warplanes – possibly French, Italian and American – would be lying in wait for him as he passed down Italy’s west coast. All that was required was patience – and a sure shot. The assassins would be gone before Gaddafi hit the water.
However, the theory continues, Gaddafi was tipped off as to his peril, and opted to divert his Tupolev jet to Malta. But this news did not reach his would-be killers – nor Ezedin Koal, the Libyan pilot of a MiG-23, who had been dispatched north from Tripoli to rendezvous with his leader, and escort him home. It was he who first spotted Flight 870, approaching the north coast of Sicily, roughly where Gaddafi’s Tupolev should have been – and heading in the correct direction. Mis-identifying it in the failing light, he circled it, then fell into step with it. All this happened under the wolfish gaze of what may have been up to nine hostile aircraft – who watched the MiG-23’s manoeuvre, and took it as confirmation that their quarry had arrived. The button was pushed; Flight 870 was ripped apart as it a fist had been punched through wallpaper. All that was left now was to deal with the witness. Koal, realising that he was in a desperate position, tried to flee, but was harried to his doom, crashing into the Sila Mountains in Calabria, on the Italian mainland.
Is there any evidence that any of this happened? Yes, but on a purely circumstantial basis.
For one thing, there was a body. On July 18 1980, three weeks after Flight 870’s demise, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG-23 – along with the corpse of its pilot, badly decomposed in the sticky heat of summer – was found near the Calabrian village of Castelsilano. In October 2011, once Gaddafi had been lynched by his own people, a cache of secret files was unearthed in Tripoli. It identified Koal as the dead MiG-23 pilot – and outlined the theory detailed above; the assassination attempt, the awful mistake, the hiding of the trail.
An unreliable record? Absolutely. To subscribe to a theory solely on the word of Libyan intelligence would be wildly irresponsible. But other shreds of evidence lend it a certain amount of plausibility. Filing his report in 1999, Priore complained that he had been deliberately hindered by the Italian military and secret service in a conspiracy of silence that went all the way up the chain of command to NATO. Four Italian Air Force generals and five other officials would subsequently be charged with high treason and perjury. The charges would be denied, but the cases would go to court. Two of the generals were found not guilty in April 2004; the other cases collapsed due to lack of evidence and time – Italy’s statute of limitations is 10 years; it had been 24 since Flight 870 went down. Further appeals and rulings, in 2005 and 2007, ensured that all four generals were fully acquitted.
And that seemed to be that. Until 2008, that is, when the former Italian president Francesco Cossiga – whose earlier spell as prime minister had run from August 1979 to October 1980 – went on national television to point the finger at Paris. He had been told by Italian secret service agents, he said, that Flight 870 had been shot down by a French warplane. He would provide no further details, and would die in 2010, but his admission was enough for another official investigation into the disaster to be opened, in June 2008.
It would take three more years for there to be any further progress. In September 2011, a civil tribunal in Palermo ordered the Italian government to pay €100million (£86 million by the conversion rate of the time) to the families of the victims of Flight 870 – stating that it had failed to protect the aircraft and its passengers, concealed the truth, and destroyed evidence. The ruling would be upheld, following an appeal, in 2015. Two years earlier, in January 2013, Italy’s Supreme Court had finally taken a stance and gone on record – declaring that it was “abundantly” clear that the flight had been struck by a missile, and announcing that the country’s Ministries of Defence and Transport were obliged to compensate the bereaved. It stopped short of saying who had pulled the trigger.
Perhaps that will never be revealed – although the victims’ families have been unstinting in their calls for full disclosure. “We still hope the truth will come out,” Daria Bonfietti – who lost her brother in the disaster – told the Guardian in 2006. “We know that, very probably, the plane was struck down by a missile. Too many people have been keeping this secret for too long, but we will not give up until we know everything that happened.”
She was speaking as Flight 870 travelled its last few miles. For almost two decades, the fragmented DC-9-15 had been sitting in a hangar in Rome, where investigators could probe its broken body for clues. But now, it was being transferred back to Bologna on a phalanx of lorries, wrapped in plastic that might as well have been a shroud. On June 27 2007, it would be unveiled as a memorial-cum exhibit at the Museo per la Memoria di Ustica (Museum for the Memory of Ustica; museomemoriaustica.it), a corpse frozen in its dying moment; its death incontrovertible, but the whodunnit still officially unresolved.
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
Woeful article by the torygraph - quelle surprise - the technical investigation would (almost certainly) have determined whether it was hit by something because missiles, by their very nature, explode: they throw vast numbers of fragments into the air in the hope that some of those lumps will hit the target.
The obvious reference point here in the Malaysian flight 370 shot down over Ukraine - significant lumps of the airframe were missing/unrecovered, and yet the investigation team were able to determine not just that it had by shot down, but by what, and exactly where the missile had detonated. The fuselage and wings of the aircraft were absolutely riddled with missile debris.
The obvious reference point here in the Malaysian flight 370 shot down over Ukraine - significant lumps of the airframe were missing/unrecovered, and yet the investigation team were able to determine not just that it had by shot down, but by what, and exactly where the missile had detonated. The fuselage and wings of the aircraft were absolutely riddled with missile debris.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Italy - a country famed for the transparency and accuracy of its public inquiries, and the reliability of the results produced by same.
T & P
|-o-| (-o-) |-o-|
But doesn't the article suggest that most of the numerous official enquiries into the crash might have been interfered with and a cover-up maintained for decades? Not saying it's true or likely, but if it were true it would explain why the first four official enquiries, all conducted by Italian-only teams in Italian soil, would have failed to spot something so obvious as a missile strike.
High Voltage
In the top 97% of Urban's most interesting posters
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Right lads, I've been saving this one:
Here's a long read about a post war project to convert Catalina flying boats into airgoing yachts for bored millionaires:
A couple of the photos are ever so slightly NSFW, depending on where you work. I mean they're just barely NSFW, but you may want to use your skill and judgement there.
Here's a long read about a post war project to convert Catalina flying boats into airgoing yachts for bored millionaires:
A couple of the photos are ever so slightly NSFW, depending on where you work. I mean they're just barely NSFW, but you may want to use your skill and judgement there.
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A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
The article hit the nail on the head in terms of the photos. But what an amazing concept. Pity the maintenance would make it untenable. But still. so cool.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
I would love to fly in one of those. Absolutely amazing things.
A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
You can with these people. Spoiler alert, it isn't cheap. I wouldn't mind.
The Catalina Society - Home of Plane Sailing is the supporters club for the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina based at Duxford Airfield in the UK
The Catalina Society - Home of Plane Sailing is the supporters club for the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina based at Duxford Airfield in the UK
www.catalina.org.uk
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
Spectacular article. A Cat would be superb for touring the west coast of Scotland, but the story of the Saudi adventure brought to mind hoards of spear-waving weegies...
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
You can with these people. Spoiler alert, it isn't cheap. I wouldn't mind.
The Catalina Society - Home of Plane Sailing is the supporters club for the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina based at Duxford Airfield in the UK
The Catalina Society - Home of Plane Sailing is the supporters club for the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina based at Duxford Airfield in the UK
Can I wear a flying helmet and googles and have a seat in the front bit with a twin Vickers machine gun though?
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
Are you looking for Sky Pirates rates?
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
They love a Sunderland down my way - Pembroke Dock was a Sunderland base, and it's a big part of the local history.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Who can forget Van Shtrelnikoff's famous (and terrifying) ethnography We of the Weegie?
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spitfire
Walty McWaltface
You can with these people. Spoiler alert, it isn't cheap. I wouldn't mind.
The Catalina Society - Home of Plane Sailing is the supporters club for the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina based at Duxford Airfield in the UK
The Catalina Society - Home of Plane Sailing is the supporters club for the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina based at Duxford Airfield in the UK
I've been in that. Just on the ground though. It's great to see in the air.
They sometimes open it up for the airshows and charge a couple of quid to go on board.
spitfire
Walty McWaltface
Fantastic shot.
? (Portugese?)
UK
Dutch (?) but looks like the Czech symbol so am confused because NATO.
Canadian
Belgique
Ze Germans
La France
I've heard of bird-strike!A seasonal theme:
