Provide, as Italy’s second domestic airline, scheduled flights to mainland destinations as well as points on Sicily and Sardinia. Charter operations are also undertaken. The initial fleet consists of de Havilland DH 114 Heron 2s and one of these, with four crew and seven passengers, crashes into Mt. Capanne, Elba, on October 14, 1960; there are no survivors.
Several Douglas DC-3s are acquired in 1961-1962. One of the new American-made transports with three crew and eight passengers, hits a mountain near Sora, Italy, on March 30, 1963; there are no survivors. Service continues without incident during the next six years as several Fokker F.27-100s and F.28-1000s are purchased.
The first of the latter enters service on April 21,1969. A Fokker F.27-100 is lost in a crash near Reggio di Calabria on May 24 (one dead). Although business is conducted over the next two years without incident, an F.27-100 with 18 aboard smashes into a mountain near Frosinone on April 16, 1972; there are no survivors. At year’s end, a Douglas DC-915 is purchased from Hawaiian Airlines.
Later, the fleet comes to consist of Douglas DC-9s and Fokker F.28-1000s. One of the latter types is involved in the second of the carrier’s three fatal accidents, on January 1, 1974. En route from Cagliari to Geneva, a Fokker with 4 crew and 38 passengers, crashes 2 nm. short of the runway while landing at Torino Caselle Airport at Turin in very bad weather (39 dead); among the victims are 5 members of the American Brickheimer family.
An F.28-1000 with 50 passengers fails its takeoff from Bergamo on April 9, 1975 and makes a forced landing that is 200 m. short of the end of the runway; there are no fatalities.
The carrier’s third fatal disaster is very controversial. Flight 870, the Ex-Hawaiian DC-9-15 with 4 crew and 77 passengers en route from Bologna to Palermo, disappears into the Tyrrhenian Sea, off Naples, on June 27, 1980. On December 18 of that year, Italian Transportation Minister Rino Formica reports that the crash was caused by a missile, a view that will be debated for over a decade. Operations of the airline, meanwhile, continue apace until Itavia closes its doors for financial reasons at the end of 1989.
In 1990, Franco Scottoni and Luigi Di Stefano review the missile evidence in their Ustica, Quel Maledetto Missile (Roma, Italy: Atlantis, 1990).
On February 9, 1991, a motion picture, The Rubber Wall, opens in Italian theaters and depicts the 1980 disaster as a government cover-up of a shoot down by “friendly” warplanes. The controversy is further flamed after the Magellan 725, a remotely operated vehicle owned by Eastport International, recovers the flight recorder from the Tyrrhenian Sea and photographs 350 pieces of wreckage at a depth of 10,825 ft. during the first week of August.
Claudio Gatti and Gail Hammer revisit the case in their Il Quinto Scenario (Milano, Italy: Rizzoli, 1994) while Daria Lucca, Paolo Miggiano, and Andrea Purgatori rework the topic in A Un Passo Dalla Guerra (Milano, Italy: Sperling & Kupfer, 1995).
It will be revealed in 1996-1997 that the 1980 incident was the result of political differences between the West and Libya. According to information filed in the 1980 hull-loss database of the Aviation Safety Network, a pair of Libyan MiG fighters had concealed themselves from radar detection by flying closely to the Itavia jetliner. This move is detected by either French or U. S. forces in the area, aircraft from which fire on the MiGs. An errant missile strikes Flight 870, causing it to disintegrate and crash off Ustica Island. One MiG escapes, while the other is shot down over Calabria.
World History
