Plane hits skyscraper in Milan
April 18, 2002 Posted: 12:22 PM EDT (1622 GMT)




MILAN, Italy (CNN) -- A small plane has hit a skyscraper in central Milan, setting the top floors of the 30-story building on fire, an Italian journalist told CNN.

The crash by the Piper tourist plane into the 26th floor occurred at 5:50 p.m. (1450 GMT) on Thursday, said journalist Desideria Cavina.

The building houses government offices and is next to the city's central train station. Several storeys of the building were engulfed in fire, she said.

Italian TV says the crash put a hole in the 25th floor of the Pirelli building, and that smoke is pouring from the opening.

Police and ambulances are at the scene. Many people were on the streets as they left work for the evening at the time of the crash.

Police were trying to keep people away, and many ambulances were on the scene.

There is no word yet on casualties.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/04/18/italy.milan/index.html

At first Fox News was reporting it as a terrorist act, now they are saying that the pilot sent out a SOS regarding engine problems. May have been an accident.

One thing strange about this lastest tragedy is that when my daughter saw the hole in the building in Tampa caused by a small a/c she said she was surprised by how little the affected area of the building was. This sounds if it is being reported accurately, as if it was a lot more devasting to the building. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Flight originated in Switzerland not Slovenia.

MILAN, Italy, April 18 � A small airplane crashed into one of Milan�s tallest buildings Thursday, setting the top floors on fire, Italian police reported. Italian rescue officials reported that at least two people were killed after the Piper aircraft struck the 32-story Pirelli building, which is in the heart of the city�s financial district. Early details were sketchy, but news reports immediately set off fears that it might be a terrorist act akin to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. Those fears sent U.S. stocks tumbling in late-morning trading, but they began to rebound a short time later.

http://msnbc.com/news/740516.asp#BODY

More at:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Italy-Plane-Crash.html

Here is the story from the Swiss press. The flight started in Switzerland. It's being reported that the a/c was a 'single-engine Commander 112 propeller-driven aircraft.'

Investigators probe Italian plane crash


The crash caused extensive damage to Milan's Pirelli Tower [Keystone]


Authorities in Italy are investigating why a Swiss-registered light aircraft crashed into a skyscraper in the northern city of Milan.

Audio / Video / Links


The crash killed three people - including the pilot - and left dozens of people injured. It was initially feared to be the work of terrorists, sparking memories of the September 11 attacks in the United States.

Officials in Milan said on Friday that 12 people remained in hospital - two of them in a serious condition.

Italian authorities said the pilot, who police later named as 67-year-old Luigi Fasulo from the Swiss town of Pregassona, seemed to have trouble with his landing gear and veered off course shortly before the plane ploughed into the 30-storey Pirelli building on Thursday night.

The 1950s building is home to the local regional government, providing offices for 1,750 people. However, the top five floors of the offices were nearly empty at the time of the accident as they were being renovated.

Rescue worker, Carlo Lio, said it was a stroke of luck that more people were not killed when the 27th floor collapsed onto the 26th floor.



Deadly error

Fasulo took off in his single-engine Commander 112 propeller-driven aircraft shortly after 5pm from Locarno airport in Switzerland.

He is reported to have contacted air traffic controller at Milan�s Linate airport some 30 minutes later, saying he was having problems with the plane�s landing gear.

The airport told him to fly west, however, for some reason Fasulo headed north towards the city, saying he was resolving the problem.

More at:

http://www2.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=111&sid=1112722

I believe this might be a photo of the type of plane that hit the building in Milan that I got from Stuart's and Bob's site:

http://www.photovault.com/Link/Technology/Aviation_General/show.asp?tg=TAGVolume04/TAGV04P09_02

More about the pilot of the Milan tragedy. There are some reports out that apparently say he may have committed suicide due to financial problems but this seems to be refuted by some of his family members.

From the Swiss press:

Crash pilot on detour to save fuel tax - friends

By Christian Plumb

LOCARNO, Switzerland (Reuters) - The pilot who crashed into a Milan skyscraper on Thursday, killing himself and two others, had been making a detour from Switzerland to Italy to save fuel taxes, friends and fellow pilots said.

Luigi Fasulo, 67, had taken off from the southern Swiss town of Locarno for Milan, some 30 minutes away by plane, and had planned to return almost immediately to Lugano, another town in Italian-speaking southern Switzerland.

Pilots said they regularly made such short jaunts to Italy after filling up their tanks in Switzerland. By flying across the border they can claim to have exported the fuel and reclaim the fuel taxes from Swiss customs authorities when they return.

Gody Zueger, vice president of local flying club Gruppo Volo Motore Locarno, told Reuters this was a tried and tested routine among cost-conscious pilots in the border region.

"With the 300-some litres of fuel such a plane can take, you can save over 200 Swiss francs (84 pounds) with a short flight to Milan," he said. "It's totally simple and done very often."

Friends described Fasulo as an aggressive but skilled flier.

The rest of the story:

http://www2.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&eid=1113610

Here is an article where suicide is suggested as a motive. It appears that the pilot's son was a swissair pilot:

Son of Milan crash pilot believes it was suicide

The son of the pilot who crashed into the Pirelli building in Milan believes his father committed suicide.

Marco Fasulo told La Repubblica newspaper that his father was having serious financial problems.

Investigations are continuing into why Luigi Fasulo's small plane crashed into the 30-storey landmark, killing at least five people and injuring 60.

Marco, a pilot with Swiss Air, said: "I have no doubts that he has tried to commit suicide, he was in very difficult economic conditions, and he decided to kill himself."

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_570587.html?menu=

MILAN, Italy � The son of the pilot who crashed his plane into the tallest building in Milan says his 67-year-old father was despondent over financial problems and was committing suicide.

"It was a suicide, a suicide, do you understand?" Luigi Fasulo's son, Marco � a pilot for the airline Swiss Air Lines � told the Rome newspaper La Repubblica Friday.

But Italian authorities believe the crash, which killed the pilot and two other people and injured 36, was a terrible accident.

Fasulo reported trouble with his landing gear and had been speaking with air traffic control before Thursday's crash, officials said, ruling out that the crash was a terror attack.

The plane crashed into the 25th floor of the landmark Pirelli building, the tallest skyscraper in Milan. The number of injured, put originally at 60, was revised downward Friday to 36, with 11 of them still hospitalized.

Milan Chief Prosecutor Gerardo D'Ambrosio said suicide was the least credible of three possible explanations police were examining � including a technical problem or pilot illness.

Italian Transport Minister Pietro Lunardi, in a Friday briefing in the Senate, said the pilot could have fallen ill at the controls. After making initial radio contact, "there was silence, he was not operating any of the plane's controls in the last two minutes," he said.

More at:

http://foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50715,00.html

Here's an update to this tragic story from the Swiss press:

The pilot of a light aircraft that crashed into a skyscraper in the Italian city of Milan on Thursday had been swindled out of more than SFr2.5 million.


Police investigating the crash said that Luigi-Gino Fasulo’s desperation could have led him to commit suicide.

A deputy chief of Milan police, Giuseppe De Angelis, said police couldn’t rule out the theory that Fasulo had committed suicide because of his economic ups and downs.

The suicide theory was first raised by Fasulo’s son, Marco, who was quoted in an Italian daily newspaper as saying his father may have taken his life because he felt cheated.



Money troubles

Fasulo, from the Swiss town of Pregassona, had reportedly lent the money to a business associate, who was supposed to repay the loan on to an Austrian bank account.

On Thursday morning, just hours before the crash, Fasulo and one of his sons tried to file a complaint about the missing money with police in the northern Italian town of Como. But the authorities told him they couldn’t do anything about something that had occurred in Austria.

The 67-year-old Fasulo was in desperate financial straits. He had put his plane up for sale on an Internet site for SFr115 thousand.

More at:

http://www2.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=111&sid=1115164

If it is determined (if that is even possible), that this Milan crash was a suicide rather than an accident, how terrible would that be that someone would kill and injure other people because they were having financial problems? Guess I just don't get it.