«18 seconds»” is a 4-episode podcast that retraces the Linate air disaster which claimed the lives of 118 people. 18 seconds are those that elapsed on October 8th, 2001 from the time of the impact between a Scandinavian Airlines plane taking off on the main runway and a Cessna at Milan Linate airport and the crash of the SAS aircraft into the airport’s baggage building. This was the worst disaster in the history of Italian civil aviation.
The podcast (in Italian) was produced by Elisabetta Francia in collaboration with Comitato 8 ottobre (the association that gathers the families of the victims), with the sponsorship of Fondazione Cariplo and the media partnership of Italy’s national daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Giangiacomo Schiavi, editor of the Corriere della Sera writes in this article:
«”It was human error caused by fog,” we were told at first: the pilot of the small Cessna took the wrong taxiway, ignoring both “control tower directives” and the “horizontal and vertical signage” that should have stopped him.
But within a few hours it turned out that the visibility was not that low, there had been a chain of errors and underestimations, a ground radar that did not work because bureaucracy blocked a signature, faded signage, too many planes moving in the Milan airport, the nonchalance with which private aircraft cut the main runway…».
Concepts which, more or less, apply to so many of the tragedies that have marked Italy over the last twenty years, not least the one in Mestre a few days ago.
That day, I was there
As many know, on October 8th 2001, 4 hours after the accident I was at Linate called by SAS to manage crisis communication. An assignment that lasted five years. A dramatic experience that scarred me deeply and which I partly recounted in my speech at the TEDx Monza e Brianza in February 2020.
Thanks to Elisabetta Francia for involving me in this important project (my contribution can be heard in episode 4). It helps keep alive the memory of that tragic day and what the relatives had to suffer, in addition to the loss of their loved ones, due to the complete lack of preparedness of all the public actors involved, starting with the airport operator.
New regulations
Looking at the glass half full – at least in the airport sector – thanks to the relentless work of the October 8th Committee, some progress has been made through the approval on June 6th 2023 of the new regulation issued by the Italian Civil Aviation Authority ENAC – Ente Nazionale per l’Aviazione Civile to airport operators concerning the development of family assistance plans (“Redazione e gestione del piano di assistenza alle vittime di incidente aereo e loro familiari”). The new regulation was developed by a small working group in which I was invited to participate pro-bono.
If you understand Italian, I invite you to listen to the podcast which is available on all major platforms (link also provided with the photo above).