Hangtime, Hamish, Dinger.
Regarding Cermis,
The flight was a NOE training flight, i'm not surprised they flyed so low, lot of Nato pilots do the same, and the only hope the Italian pilots in the older G91s and now in the AMX had in case of war was to fly in valleys veeeery low.
Training is important, but...
Doing this in a densly populated land need accurate planning and a strictly controlled execution.
As i remember the flight was in some way not classified as a NOE training flight, and the flight plan was different from the real path followed by the pilot, and (most important) they where using a camera to make some souvenir filming, so is'nt hard to me to imagine some kind of "look, i'm good!!" attitude (talking about to be in other's shoes).
Add the bad maps in use, and you have the accident sequence complete.
They screwed, as lot of pilots do when full of toejam.
Where the ugly attitude comes out is in the moments after the accident, when the pilots start saying they do nothing bad and nobody else than the US government had to investigate their actions, they seemed to forget to be in an allied country, having the rights to know who and why killed that people.
They where ugly supposing was fair to violate the Rules because there where Italian rules, not US rules.
And this happen a lot when US combatants are involved, because the train or the education they have, the US position in the world, and the "cowboy" attitude (see the handgun threads), make they feel the rules are for weak, the strong can do anythink he want, unless stopped by a stronger power.
This as a little contribution to the problem, a lot longer post needed to explain the complete vision i have about Cermis and similar facts.
Because of my bad english, i have noticed a little misunderstanding of my attitude.
I wish to explain, to clarify this.
Usually i use quite different points of wiev to examine a problem, and different levels of generalization.
This mean i dont hate Americans as people, nor USA as the whole nation, nor i am a nationalist (lol, Italian nationalist?, it's hard to find one... but there are few), i citicize some attitudes the US general culture develope in some induviduals.
It's a question of contest, i am convinced people i see in this community are nice people, and i salute all, only some of them become less nice in some situation, e.g. Hangtime in a P51, [deleted], Torque in energy advantage, Fariz in a Spit, when they shot me down (you are overmodelled, HTC have to fix you).
[edit]
I meant "we miss you Dinger"
, sorry for my bad english.
[/edit]
[This message has been edited by Naso (edited 08-08-2000).]