The A-11B Ghibli, a single-engine reconnaissance jet, was on a routine training flight from Rimini to Verona. Over the Apennine Mountains, a fire broke out in its rear compartment. Thick smoke filled the cockpit. The pilot, Lieutenant Giorgio Davide Zuccolini, 27, followed procedure. He steered the aircraft away from populated areas, climbed to 8,000 feet, and ejected. The time was 10:24 a.m. on December 6, 1990. The jet, now a 7.5-ton unmanned projectile, did not crash into the mountains. Its flight path stabilized. It began a slow, forty-mile descent in a wide, gentle arc.
It flew itself northeast, across the winter sky, for eight minutes. At 10:32 a.m., it struck the "Istituto Superiore Statale Salvemini," a vocational high school in the Casalecchio di Reno suburb of Bologna. It hit a third-floor classroom during a lesson break. The fuel tanks exploded. The impact and fire killed twelve students instantly, all between 14 and 17 years old. Eighty-eight other students and staff were injured. The wreckage missed a densely populated apartment block by seventy meters.
An investigation absolved the pilot of blame, confirming his ejection was necessary and timely. The cause of the fire was traced to a faulty electrical cable. The tragedy exposed a flaw in emergency planning: no one had considered the glide potential of a pilotless jet. The aircraft's automatic flight control system had kept it level after ejection, turning an accident into a guided missile.
The crash led to immediate changes in Italian Air Force regulations, mandating that pilots, when possible, steer aircraft toward the sea or remote areas before ejecting. A memorial garden now stands at the school. The event remains a specific, haunting example of a chain of routine failures—a short circuit, a fire, a successful ejection—culminating in a statistically improbable catastrophe.