Italian formation aerobatics did not begin in 1961. It began at Campoformido, outside Udine, in the late 1920s, when Colonel Rino Corso Fougier ran the 1° Stormo Caccia and built a school around the idea that fighter pilots should fly tied together. At its most extravagant he had twenty aircraft in the air in one formation. Rivolto is a few minutes’ flying from that field, and when the air force decided to stop letting every wing run its own display team it put the new national unit here deliberately, to inherit that address.

The teams it replaced were good and they were a problem. Through the 1950s the Cavallino Rampante of the 4ª Aerobrigata flew Vampires and then Sabres, the Getti Tonanti of the 5ª flew F-84Gs, the Tigri Bianche and the Lancieri Neri flew Sabres for the 51ª and 2ª, and the Diavoli Rossi of the 6ª flew F-84F Thunderstreaks. Five wings were each carrying the cost, the training burden and the risk of a display team, and none of them could be the national one.

On 1 March 1961 the 313° Gruppo Addestramento Acrobatico was constituted at Rivolto and Major Mario Squarcina, who had led the Diavoli Rossi, was told to build one team out of the survivors of five. It began with six F-86E Sabres. The first public display was flown on 1 May 1961 over Trento-Gardolo, a four-plus-one formation, and the name Frecce Tricolori followed the smoke rather than the other way round.

The cost of learning showed immediately. On 3 May 1961, two days after that first display, two of the new team’s aircraft collided in training at Rivolto and a pilot was killed. The base has never been a museum piece: it is a working training field where the same figures are flown several times a day from March to October, and the accident record over sixty-five years reflects that.

The Frecce Tricolori fly nine aircraft in formation and one alone. The soloist, Pony 10, flies opposition — rolls, Schneider loops, inverted passes — while the nine hold the set pieces, and the two halves of the display are built to cross. The configuration settled in 1963 and has not changed since, which makes it the largest permanent display formation of any air force in the world; Guinness World Records put a certificate on that on 26 March 2023.

The call signs are "Pony", which is not a joke about size. It is a reference to the prancing horse of Francesco Baracca, worn by the 4º Stormo, whose Cavallino Rampante team was one of the five the Frecce replaced. The commander flies as Pony 0, the formation leader as Pony 1, and the soloist as Pony 10.

Three aircraft have carried the team. Six F-86E Sabres from 1961 to 1963; the Fiat G.91PAN, a purpose-modified version of the Italian light fighter, from the 1963–64 conversion until the 1981 season; and the Aermacchi MB-339A/PAN from 1982 to the present, later brought up to a mid-life standard. On 12 September 2024 the air force announced at Istrana that the successor would be the Leonardo M-346, chosen over the smaller M-345 because the lighter aircraft was not judged suitable for large-formation aerobatics. The team will stay at ten.

The smoke was there from the start. Captain Angelo Luca Nardella designed a system in 1961 that fed dyed mineral oil into the exhaust and could produce all three national colours from one aircraft. The wingtip tanks came off for aerobatic reasons and the oil was moved into mixed underwing tanks carrying both smoke fluid and fuel. Since the 1990s the closing figure has drawn a tricolour roughly five kilometres long, usually over the music.

At about 15:44 on Sunday 28 August 1988, in front of a crowd variously estimated at 30,000 and 300,000 at the American air base at Ramstein in the Rhineland-Palatinate, the Frecce Tricolori were flying the cardioide: nine aircraft split into two groups trace a heart in coloured smoke along the display line and the soloist crosses through the point where they meet, several hundred feet above them.

The soloist, Lieutenant Colonel Ivo Nutarelli, did not arrive where he was supposed to. His load factor fell away during the set-up, his climbing path straightened, he cut the inverted segment short and came down steeper and faster than the figure allowed. At roughly 33 metres his tailplane destroyed the cockpit of the number two aircraft, flown by Captain Giorgio Alessio; a fraction of a second later he struck the leader, Lieutenant Colonel Mario Naldini. Alessio and Naldini were killed in the air. Nutarelli’s aircraft, doing something close to 300 knots, went through the barrier and into the crowd, and burning fuel went with it. Naldini’s aircraft threw a wing into the UH-60 standing by as the medical evacuation helicopter.

Thirty-one spectators were killed at once. Thirty-six more died of their injuries in the following days and weeks — which is where the frequently quoted figure of sixty-seven comes from — and with the three Italian pilots the official total is seventy, recorded when the count was formally closed on 21 November 1988. Among the sixty-seven was Captain Kim Jon Strader of the US Army, the medevac pilot, who died of burns on 17 September. Around 500 people were injured and 336 were taken to hospital on the day. Some German sources add an unborn child and give seventy-one.

The Italian Air Force board of inquiry found that human factors were the principal cause: an error by the soloist both in setting up the manoeuvre and in judging the timing of his corrections. That is the finding, and it has not been overturned. Because Naldini and Nutarelli had flown the TF-104G that squawked an emergency code near the Itavia DC-9 on the night of the Ustica disaster in 1980, and were regarded by the later judicial inquiry as significant witnesses, the crash has attracted conspiracy theories for nearly forty years. No investigation has ever found evidence linking the two events, and the Ramstein finding stands on its own.

Germany stopped flying displays the next day. The ban was total and it held for three years. When aerobatic displays returned in 1991 they came back under conditions that are now taken for granted across Europe: a mandatory minimum height, a mandatory separation between the display line and the public, no manoeuvre flown over the crowd or pointed at it, and every routine approved in advance rather than agreed on the day.

The German rules went further than most. Displays must be flown parallel to the safety line; for jets the line sits at least 230 metres from the crowd and for tactical demonstrations 350 metres, with a minimum display height of 450 feet for jets. Foreign military jet teams did not display in Germany again until the Patrouille de France appeared at the ILA in 2000, and complex formation breaks — the family of manoeuvre that killed people at Ramstein — stayed prohibited until ILA 2012.

The effect was not confined to Germany. NATO asked member nations to review their display manoeuvres and revised the alliance’s air display safety standard, STANAG 3533. The principle that opposing or crossing manoeuvres must never be aimed at the crowd line, and that the crossing point must be displaced away from it, is now standard practice in British, French and Italian display regulation. The plain summary is uncomfortable but true: the rules that now exist would have prohibited the manoeuvre that killed those people.

The disaster also rewrote German emergency medicine. Incompatible infusion fittings between German and allied rescue services led to the adoption of the international Luer standard; the role of the Leitender Notarzt, a senior doctor who commands a mass-casualty response instead of treating patients, was established; and the first German victim-support group was set up, which is the ancestor of today’s crisis-intervention teams. Ramstein is remembered in Germany at least as much for that as for the aircraft.

Rivolto is the seat of the 2° Stormo "Mario D’Agostini", which is not a flying wing at all. The 2° began as a fighter unit, formed at Turin on 25 December 1925, fought in Africa, flew F-104Gs from Treviso-Sant’Angelo and AMXs in the 1990s, moved to Rivolto in 1994, gave up its aircraft in 2002 and converted to the surface-to-air missile role, the 313° Gruppo reverting to autonomous status on 1 July 2007. It is the air force’s national reference point for ground-based air defence.

Its Gruppo Missili operates the Spada 2000 point-defence system with Aspide missiles, and the 80° Gruppo OCU trains its crews. The batteries travel: they have covered the Genoa G8 in 2001, the funeral of John Paul II in 2005, and a battery was flown to Trapani-Birgi at short notice during the Libyan crisis in 2011. The 14° Gruppo, the last fast-jet squadron resident at Rivolto, left with its AMXs in 2004.

The base is also a fixture of the Italian calendar in a way few military airfields are. Rivolto has hosted the team’s anniversary air shows since the 1960s; the sixtieth, on 18 and 19 September 2021, brought most of Europe’s display teams to Friuli. And in the spring of 2020, with the country shut down, the Frecce flew the Giro d’Italia: five days from 25 to 29 May over all twenty regional capitals, beginning at Codogno and Milan and finishing over Rome on 2 June.