The lifeless body of the pilot of the Eurofighter military fighter of the 37th wing , who crashed yesterday for reasons yet to be ascertained while he was returning from a mission to the Trapani Birgi base, was recovered by the fire brigade teams.
The discovery took place in the Locogrande area, a few kilometers north of Marsala.
The searches, carried out with the aid of illuminating balloons, were conducted by the Nbcr nucleus firefighters who identified, together with a team from the Air Force, the remains of the fighter in the bed of a river.
The aircraft, from an initial reconstruction, crashed to the ground about five miles southeast of the air base it belongs to , disintegrated on impact, with flaming wreckage found several hundred meters apart.
The hope of finding the pilot alive had already become more feeble as the hours went by: in fact, no alert had arrived to the ejection warning system, i.e. the launch from the aircraft.
The aircraft, a single-seat multi-role Typhoon interceptor fighter, returned from a reconnaissance in the hinterland, after a training mission - which lasted perhaps about an hour - with another Eurofighter which instead returned to the military airport.
The Air Force will launch a flight safety investigation in the next few hours. The victim's name was Fabio Antonio Altruda, 33 years old, originally from Caserta : Altruda had entered the Air Force with the regular Ibis 5/o course of the Pozzuoli Air Force Academy in 2007. "Combat ready" pilot on Eurofighter aircraft, under the 37th Stormo of Trapani since March 2021, had hundreds of flight hours to its credit, many of which were also carried out in NATO operations outside national borders.
(Unioneonline/D)
