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Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870, also known in the Italian media as (\"Disastro di Ustica\") the Ustica Disaster, was an Italian flight that suffered an in-flight explosion while in route from Bologna, Italy to Palermo. Italy. more...

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It was a regularly scheduled flight from Guglielmo Marconi Airport in Bologna, Italy to Palermo International Airport in Palermo, Italy. The flight departed 2 hours late at 8.08 pm CET on June 27, 1980. At the controls of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15 that evening were Captain Domenico Gatti and First Officer Enzo Fontana.

The aircraft (registered I-TIGI), which left Guglielmo Marconi Airport bound for Palermo International Airport, crashed at 8.59 pm CET into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica, Italy about 80 miles (130 km) southwest of Naples, Italy. All 81 people on board were killed (2 flight crew members, 2 flight attendants, and 77 passengers).

Two Italian Air Force F-104s were scrambled at 9.00 pm CET from Grosseto Air Force Base to locate the accident area and to spot any survivors but they failed due to lack of visibility. In July 2006 the re-assembled fragments of the DC-9 aircraft were returned to Bologna from Pratica di Mare Air Force Base near Rome.

Official explanation

After years of investigations, no official explanation or final report have been provided by the Italian government. The most recent technical report submitted in 1997 by the Justice-nominated commission (the Misiti commission), which for the first time had access to the full roster of evidences and wreckage remains, indicates unanimously that only the internal explosion hypothesis is compatible with evidences from the wreckage and \"proposes to the Justice to accept its conclusion that the accident has been caused by an internal explosion\". The report also indicates that radar track records exclude the presence of other aircraft within 50 miles of the accident site at the relevant time. The latter conclusion concerning radar tracks was also confirmed by a subsequent report of a further Justice-nominated commission (the Dalle Mese commission) which also confirms the conclusion of an internal explosion.

On January 10, 2007, the Cassazione Court of Italy conclusively closed the case, fully acquitting two Italian Air Force former Generals, Lamberto Bartolucci and Franco Ferri, of any wrong doing, confirming the result of the two preceeding judicial steps ('primo grado' and 'appello').

Alternative theories

Speculation at the time and in the years since has been fueled in part by media reports, military officials statements, and ATC recordings, including radar images and trails of debris; particularly, trails of objects moving at high speeds.

A terrorist bomb

After the series of bombings which hit Italy in the 70's (Piazza Fontana bombing, 1969; Piazza della Loggia bombing, Brescia, 1974; Italicus train bombing, 1974), a terrorist act was quite naturally the first to be proposed. The NAR (Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari), an extreme-right terrorist organization claimed credit for it on June 28, 1980. Two NAR terrorists were indeed convicted many years later for the Bologna massacre, i.e. the bombing which killed 85 people and wounded 200 on August 2, 1980 at the central train station in Bologna, the same town whence Flight 870 departed. The terrorist track was not pursued actively, mostly due to pressure from media supporting alternative (typically, \"war games\") theories. Another reason often mentioned is that the flight was delayed outbound from Bologna by almost three hours, so apparently the timer would have been set to actually cause an explosion at Palermo airport, or on a further flight of the same plane (of course, another possibility is that the device had been set up so as to be triggered by an unsuspecting passenger or crew on activating some on-board device).