The light was already going on Thursday afternoon when a twin-rotor shape lifted away from the airfield at Brčko, in the flat farmland where Bosnia and Herzegovina runs up against the river Sava. Phone cameras on the ground caught what happened next. The helicopter is low. It is turning. Then it is not turning so much as rotating, the whole fuselage swinging around a point it cannot escape, and it goes into a field outside the village of Gorice.

Fifteen people were on board, all of them Italian. Four of them did not survive. Eleven were pulled out and taken to hospitals in Brčko and Tuzla, where EUFOR said they were in stable condition. The aircraft was a Boeing CH-47F Chinook of Italian Army Aviation, flying for the European Union force that has kept a military presence in Bosnia since 2004.

It is the worst day the EU mission has had in a long time, and it has happened to one of the most capable and most heavily used transport helicopters in Europe, on what both EUFOR and the Italian chain of command describe as a routine training flight. Twenty-four hours on, nobody is saying why.

What EUFOR has actually confirmed

The European Union Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina put out a short statement from Camp Butmir on the evening of the crash, and then a second, shorter one. Stripped of everything else, it says this: an Italian CH-47 Chinook came down in the Gorice area near Brčko while conducting routine training, four of the personnel on board were lost, and eleven more were hurt.

The release is careful about two things that matter to the people who live there. No civilian infrastructure, property or vehicles were damaged, and no civilians were injured. The helicopter came down in open ground. Fuel went into the field, and local firefighters stayed at the site through the night.

EUFOR has also said it is conducting a full and thorough investigation of the incident, and that it will release more information as it is verified. The Italian Ministry of Defence has opened its own inquiry in parallel. Both of those are standard and neither is a clue.

What is not standard is the number on board. Fifteen people in a helicopter on a training sortie is a full cabin, and it is the reason a survivable-looking impact in an open field still produced four deaths and eleven injuries. A Brčko hospital spokesman told reporters that three died at the scene and a fourth died later in hospital.

The aircraft, and the regiment it came from

Italy flies a national variant of the Chinook called the ICH-47F. It is the F-model airframe with Italian mission equipment, built with Boeing and assembled in Italy by what is now Leonardo, and the first two were handed over to the Italian Army in 2014 to replace the elderly CH-47C fleet. It brought the Italians a glass cockpit, a digital automatic flight control system and a far more capable aircraft than the one it replaced.

The helicopter and its crew belonged to the 1st Army Aviation Regiment “Antares”, based at Viterbo north of Rome, whose 11th Squadrons Group “Ercole” is the Chinook unit. Italian reporting says the aircraft had flown out from Viterbo on the Wednesday, stopped at Pratica di Mare, and reached Bosnia the same day. It had been in theatre for about twenty-four hours.

Open-source trackers reported the individual aircraft as MM81782. That has not been confirmed by the Italian Ministry of Defence, and until it is, it should be treated as a report rather than a fact.

The Chinook has been in service somewhere in the world since 1962 and shows no sign of leaving it. What keeps it in the inventory of armies and air forces across NATO and well beyond it is a combination almost nothing else offers: two big rotors turning in opposite directions, so no tail rotor and no torque to fight; a cabin you can walk down; and the ability to put a useful load into a field at altitude on a hot day. The trade is complexity. Tandem rotors need a synchronising shaft between the two heads, and that shaft is one of the few genuinely single-point items on the aircraft.

The four who did not come back

The Italian Ministry of Defence released the names on Thursday night. Sergeant Simone Ruggia, 30, from Salerno, was a pilot with Army Aviation at Viterbo. Sergeant Claudio Marchesi, 35, from Orvieto, was an on-board specialist who had moved to Viterbo three years ago.

The other two were not soldiers in the ordinary sense. Lieutenant Franco Adriano Zecchillo was a doctor from Milan serving with the Volunteer Military Corps of the Italian Red Cross, the uniformed medical branch that deploys alongside the Italian armed forces. Sergeant Laura Procacci was 24, a medical student from Andria, and this was her first mission abroad.

The reaction in Rome came quickly and from everyone. President Sergio Mattarella wrote to the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Luciano Portolano, to say he had learned of the deaths with deep emotion. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani both issued statements of condolence. Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said no words exist that can fill a loss of that size, and confirmed that none of the injured was in danger of death.

In Bosnia the response was immediate too. Balkan Insight reported that the Brčko District declared a day of mourning for the Italians who died on its territory. The district is a self-governing unit that belongs to neither of the country’s two main entities, and it has had foreign soldiers on its ground, in one uniform or another, for thirty years.

What the investigators will be looking for

No cause has been established and none will be for some time. What exists so far is a short list of things investigators can see and a shorter list of things they can already rule out.

The weather is out. Visibility at Brčko was good. The mayor of the district, Siniša Milić, said publicly that the helicopter was flying low and was spinning in the moments before it struck the ground, which matches what the phone video shows and matches the fuselage breaking into three sections on impact. The landing gear was reported to have been found extended, which may mean the crew were trying to get it down somewhere.

Italian reporting has set out three working hypotheses, in roughly descending order of how seriously they are being taken. The first is a technical failure, with attention on a rotor or on the transmission that links the two rotor systems. The second is a strike on high-voltage lines shortly after lift-off, which the ground in that part of the Sava valley makes plausible. The third is crew error, which has not been formally excluded and which nobody is currently pushing. Military sources quoted by Corriere della Sera described a technical fault as close to certain, and that is a briefing, not a finding.

The next steps are mechanical rather than dramatic. The eleven survivors will be interviewed, several of whom were in the cabin and will have felt what the aircraft did before it hit. The recorders will be pulled and read. The wreckage will be recovered and laid out. Early indications are expected within days. A full reconstruction will take weeks, and quite possibly months.

Why Italian Chinooks are over Bosnia at all

Operation Althea began on 2 December 2004, when the European Union took over from NATO’s SFOR and inherited roughly four-fifths of its troops along with the job. Its mandate is the military side of the Dayton Agreement that ended the war in 1995: keep a safe and secure environment, and be visible enough that nobody tests it. Twenty-five nations contribute, including several from outside the EU.

It is a small force for a country that size. Published figures put Althea in the region of a thousand to fifteen hundred personnel, with a reserve that can be called forward. That is why helicopters matter out of proportion to their number: a handful of airframes is what turns a thousand soldiers spread across Bosnia into something that can actually reach a place quickly. Brčko sits roughly 180 km north of Sarajevo, which is a long road move and a short flight.

Italy has been one of Althea’s anchor contributors from the start and has held its command three times, most recently under Major General Maurizio Fronda, who took over in January 2026. The Chinook detachment is part of that contribution, and on Thursday it was doing the least glamorous thing an air arm does: practising, so that the day it is needed it already knows how.

Italian television coverage of the crash and what is known so far. The report includes footage filmed from the ground.

There is a version of this story that treats the Chinook as the villain, and it would be the wrong story. A 64-year-old design still in production, still being bought, still carrying fifteen people into places nothing else can reach, is not a type with a problem. What it has, this week, is four empty seats at Viterbo, and an investigation that owes those four families an answer that is right rather than quick.

Sources: EUFOR Public Affairs Office press releases, Camp Butmir, 29 October 2026; Italian Ministry of Defence; Adnkronos; Il Foglio; ANSA; Al Jazeera; Balkan Insight; ITAMilRadar; Leonardo; Italian Army.