Alitalia crash reveals dead bodies in the closet

The crashed "Alitalia" plane as it looked on Saturday

Last Saturday night, a plane crashed at Fiumicino (FCO), Rome's main airport. The initial news reports mentioned "an Alitalia flight from Pisa to Rome, veering off the runway after landing in strong winds".

Already from that moment, I was a bit surprised: I live 5 miles from the landing strip, and the wind was not unusually strong. Luckily only one person was seriously injured. But surprise: it was a flight attendent who was apparently not strapped in. Why would a flight attendant not be strapped in, during landing in strong winds?

And within hours, a more obscure story came up: While the plane had the colours and insignia from Alitalia, Italy's national carrier, and had an Alitalia flight number, it had nothing to do with Alitalia. The plane was not only operated by Carpatair, an obscure Romanian budget airline, with a Romanian crew, but was also owned by that same obscure airline. The plane itself was actually registered in Romania, and not in Italy, as Alitalia planes normally are...

More suspicion came in when I saw this Carpatair press release (.PDF):

The forcasted (sic) winds in FCO were in the limits for the ATR as aircraft type as well as those of Carpatair. Windshear predicition (sic) information was not available in the in the (sic) reports regarding actual weather and forecstaed (sic) meteorological conditions given to the crew before the flight, it was not mentioned to the pilots in the weather updates info through the ATIS (actual weather special radio frequency) during the flight or by on the tower (sic) frequency before landing

I am a firm believer that small details often reveal a full picture. A sloppy press release full of spelling/grammatical errors, puts Carpatair in the category of "duct tape and shoe lace"-airlines, in my book.
Now beyond that, what are they trying to say: that their ATR-72 aircraft should not have been flying in this weather, but nobody informed them? I smell rotten fish.

So here is my question: Explain why this is not plain fraud? While code sharing and the practice of "flights of one airline being operated by another", is common practice, in this case, there is absolutely nothing that ties this flight to Alitalia. Except the flight number.

And of course, less than 24 hours after the crash, the plane was neatly repainted, hiding all references to Alitalia.

The "Alitalia" plane, one day after the crash

Smell the dead bodies in the closet? Next thing we will hear is that a Moldovian hooker was giving the captain a blow job at the time of the crash, like with the Italian Costa Concordia cruise ship, which ran aground off the coast almost exactly a year ago...


Pictures courtesy Daily Mail and EPA.