Frecce Tricolori Aermacchi MB-339 crash

The investigation

The Ivrea Public Prosecutor's Office, in the persons of chief prosecutor Gabriella Viglione and deputy prosecutor Valentina Bossi, opened an inquiry in order to establish the dynamics of what happened, placing the pilot of the aircraft under investigation as a mandatory act.

Following these investigations the initial hypothesis on the cause of the accident was considered unreliable by the Ivrea Public Prosecutor's Office, since no traces of a bird strike were detected by the first examinations carried out by the Carabinieri Scientific Investigations Department on the exterior of the engine. The investigators therefore entrusted two professors of the Politecnico di Milano with the unrepeatable technical examination aimed at identifying the real causes of the accident, with a request for further investigation not only of the bird strike hypothesis, but also of the maintenance of the Aermacchi MB-339 “Pony 4”, flown by Major Oscar Del Dò, and of possible handling errors by the latter. Consultants were also appointed by the Aeronautica Militare and by the family of the little victim.

The examinations of the aircraft's engine, carried out on 14 November 2024, reportedly revealed traces compatible with the initial bird strike hypothesis, on which further analyses were ordered.

The preliminary expert report signed - among others - by engineer Mauro Esposito and delivered at the end of February 2025 to the magistrates of the Ivrea Public Prosecutor's Office investigating the accident that occurred at San Francesco al Campo shows that only twelve seconds after the take-off of the Frecce Tricolori from Caselle airport the Frecce Tricolori take off the aircraft «Pony 4» fails, at 16 hours 51 minutes and 49 seconds on 16 September 2023.

Ten seconds later the pilot of Pony 4, Oscar Del Dò, operates the ejection button and parachutes out. Two seconds later his aircraft crashes to the ground.

The analysis of the recordings contained in the aircraft's black box records, among other things, a multi-voice dialogue between the pilots of the team, in the section made up of five aircraft. In particular, on board Pony 5, the pilot and the official photographer, a few moments after take-off, ask each other: «Was that a bird?» one replies: «Eh, I didn't see». Immediately afterwards Pony 4 loses power due to an engine flame-out.

The Prosecutor's consultant, on the basis of these elements, considered that there was a temporal correlation between the presumed bird strike and the subsequent failure of Pony 4's engine, even though no organic traces of birds were found inside the engine, extracted from the wreckage.

In support of this thesis there are also other items of evidence assessed in the expert report, such as footage recorded by the «GoPro» video camera mounted on the right outer aircraft of the formation («Pony 4» was on the left outer position), in which the silhouette of two dark birds crossing can reportedly be clearly distinguished …