Making of ‘Ramstein’ (by Martin Füger, 1988), 2014

The story behind the photograph…

On 28 August 1988, at the US base of Ramstein in West Germany, the American Air Force put on an air show. Many of the 300,000-strong audience were US servicemen and their families; German civilians were also in attendance. As part of the display, the Frecce Tricolori aerobatic demonstration team from the Italian Air Force staged a low-level fly-through, in which two groups of jets were to combine to make a heart-shaped formation, with a lone aircraft flying between them and ‘piercing’ the heart. This complex, high-speed manoeuvre required splitsecond timing. On this occasion, it went disastrously wrong. The solo jet sliced into a second plane, and this in turn clipped a third, which crashed into a medical evacuation helicopter waiting on the tarmac. A fireball of disintegrating fuselage and aviation fuel then hurtled towards the crowd. All in all, the disaster left 70 dead and 346 seriously injured, mostly with severe burns. The carnage was captured on dozens of cameras, including Martin Füger’s, which later helped investigators piece together the events of what was – at the time – the world’s worst air show accident.