Le Frecce Tricolori translates as the Tricolor Arrows, but I find the name much more appealing in the original. Involving ten aircraft, nine in close formation plus a soloist, the Italian group is the world’s largest and most famous aerobatics patrol, with a typical flight demonstration including about twenty maneuvers in an approximately thirty-minute fly-past.

That’s thirty minutes in which the spectators, engrossed in the spectacular show, gasp and squeeze their eyes tight shut, unable to keep at bay the imaginary — and sometimes, tragically, not so imaginary — impact of colliding planes.