The ceremony was attended by the Army Chief of Staff, Army Corps General Danilo Errico, the commander of the Terrestrial Operating Forces, Army Corps General Alberto Primicerj and the Army Air Force commander, Brigadier General Antonio Bettelli, as well as numerous civil, military and religious authorities.
During the ceremony, honors were given to the personnel who distinguished themselves in service in Italy and abroad. Among these, the Silver Medal for the Value of the Army was granted to Captain Paolo Bazzano and to the first Marshal Lieutenant Lorenzo Mesaglio; the Gold Cross of Merit of the Army to Brigadier General Francesco Riccò and Colonel Salvatore Jannella; the Silver Cross of Merit of the Army to Colonel Luigi Adiletta and the Bronze Cross of Merit of the Army to the Lieutenant Colonel Marco Cardillo and the first Marshal Lieutenant Marco Vegni.
General Errico in his speech underlined the importance of this professionalism "which is based on careful selection and training and which has been witnessed both in the many emergency situations on the national territory, with interventions in favor of the populations to provide rescue, bringing supplies to isolated locations, carrying out emergency medical transport, extinguishing fires, where pain and necessity required human solidarity and the protection of life, both in the various operational theaters, from the first experiences in Lebanon, Mozambique and Namibia to to Iraq and Afghanistan passing through Kurdistan and Kosovo, which highlighted how army aviation constitutes, in addition to being a precious resource at national level, also an essential operational component in any relevant cross-border operation.
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Army aviation, born on May 10, 1951, is a technologically avant-garde specialty in continuous transformation that has rapidly established itself to become, today, a decisive component in the modern scenarios of use of the Army.
Thanks to the "dual use" capability, acquired by over 37 years of international missions, the Army Aviation is able to intervene, on the national territory, in all operations of competition and support to the population in case of public utility and in occasion of natural disasters.
The Army Aviation is able to operate 24/24 throughout the Italian territory in support of the national community through different operational uses such as summer forest fire campaigns, the competition in search and rescue operations of missing personnel, constituting over that a precious resource at national level, also an essential operational pawn in any relevant operation across the border.
The Army, from the 1982 in the firefighting campaigns, has carried out 3200 missions, totaling around 5000 hours of flight with a release of about 120.000 tons of water.
In the period 2005-2014, the Army Aviation reached a total of 190.500 flight hours of which, in the last year, over 10.000 hours spent in training missions for the preparation of the Forces, about 3.000 hours for missions for operations and over 100 hours for competing missions.
Source: Army Aviation Command
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