Ralph Salvini died in the plane crash on Sermitsiaq. In life, he fearlessly followed his heart.

Ralph Salvini was never afraid. Not even as a child.

When he was twelve years old, he visited his father in Zanzibar, where his father was stationed for work. One day, Ralph Salvini went down to the water, where his father had just returned from a short scuba dive with some friends.

Ralph Salvini also wanted to try diving, he told his father.

It was not an easy discipline, the father told his son, who had never worn a diving mask or an oxygen tank before. But the boy insisted.

Convinced that his son would give up the idea as soon as he had the ten-kilogram diving tank on his back, the father gave Ralph Salvini his equipment.

He could hardly stand upright with the tank. Nevertheless, Ralph Salvini put on the mask, put the mouthpiece in his mouth and jumped into the water without further ado. On the shore, his father could stand and watch as his son disappeared further and further into the dark blue depths.

Ralph Salvini's father tried to follow, but without the heavy equipment to pull him down, the diving suit kept him afloat. The father was terrified.

After five or six minutes, his son calmly surfaced again.

- Beautiful! I have to do it again, the boy exclaimed happily.

The episode in Zanzibar was far from the last time Ralph Salvini made his parents' pulse race. For it was with great passion and almost as great a willingness to take risks that Ralph Salvini carried himself through life – and not always with an eye to the consequences it could have or the strength it would cost him.

Where the Italian-born boy got his bold nature from is hard to say, but the drive took him all over the world and eventually all the way into the cockpit of the planes he spent his last years flying.

On October 25th last year, when Ralph Salvini was supposed to fly over Greenland in a single-engine Cessna plane, things went horribly wrong.

Minerals and stars

Ralph Salvini was born on January 8th, 1980 in Pisa, Italy. He was christened Raffaele Salvini, but as an adult he changed his first name after moving to Britain and becoming a British citizen.

In his early years, but also later as a teenager, he had difficulty making friends his own age. The friends he did make were often adults, who took him on excursions and hunts for rare earths and minerals – or looking for stars.

Ralf Salvini quickly became absorbed by the interests of his adult friends, and for a long time that was all he concentrated on and threw his love at. That was typical of him.

When Ralph Salvini finished his homework, he would go with his friends up into the mountains near the village on the outskirts of Pisa where the family home was. Sometimes he would be late for dinner, which irritated his parents a bit. He would always bring home different types of rocks and show them off. To Ralph Salvini's mother and father, they were just small rocks – but not to their son. In addition to his mother and father, Ralph Salvini also had a younger sister, Marianna, who was four years younger. While their mother was a stay-at-home mom, their father worked on various agricultural projects for the UN. As a result, his father traveled a lot and the family moved around quite a bit. Sometimes his father would be posted to countries with political unrest or where Italian was not available for instruction, and Ralph Salvini, his younger sister, and his mother would stay in Italy.

The father was typically posted for three years at each location. It wasn't always easy for the family, and in 1997, when Ralph Salvini was 17, his parents separated and later divorced. In Ecuador, where the father was working at the time, he found a new wife and Ralph Salvini's second younger sister, Chiara, was born.

The route to pilot training

Another interest that Ralph Salvini had as a child, besides minerals and stars, was computer games.

One game in particular kept him busy: flight simulator. Ralph Salvini was quite good at it, his parents think. Using the arrow keys on the computer keyboard, he landed in cities all over the world. New York, London, Chicago. He was proud when he managed to land in difficult conditions – such as in snow or in strong winds.

His interest and flair for computers later gave him the idea that this was the path he should take in his working life. When Ralph Salvini was 19, he started at the University of Pisa, with the aim of becoming an engineer.

But university was not for him, and a few years later he dropped out. He did not want to study for several years just to become a wage slave, Ralph Salvini told his father over the phone when the decision had been made.

After a few years, during which he, among other things, advocated and sold products for the global health and dietary supplement company Herbalife – an aberration that his father never understood – Ralph Salvini traveled to Egypt. Here he got a job at a holiday resort in Sharm el-Sheikh.

At first, his work consisted mostly of entertaining the tourists and families who stayed at the resort. Later, he became a diving instructor and dived with tourists in the Red Sea.

The salary wasn't the best, but he seemed happy to be allowed to spend so much time underwater, at one with nature. He sent many pictures to his family of the sharks and fish he was diving with. He was constantly tanned and blond during that period.

It wasn't only around Egypt that he dived. While diving outside the Canary Islands, he met his first wife. She was a tourist visiting from Madrid. They married in Pisa in 2007 and together they had their daughter, Martina, in 2011.

In the years leading up to the birth of their daughter, Ralph Salvini moved to the UK with his wife, where they trained together to become cabin crew for the British airline Ryan Air.

Here Ralph Salvini was quickly seized by a dream of becoming a pilot. A new path had appeared for him that could combine his interest in computers and nature.

With financial help from his mother, Ralph Salvini completed his pilot training, and in 2011 he could call himself a pilot.

'Ferry pilot'

In 2011, there was an economic crisis in large parts of Europe – including in the UK, where there was tough competition for good pilot jobs. Especially as a newly qualified pilot, it was difficult to get a job.

But Ralph Salvini's love for everything to do with aviation, planes and airports was unwavering, and he continued undeterred down the path he had chosen.

For four or five years, he worked at a car rental company located near Stansted Airport in London, just to be close to the planes.

Finally, in the summer of 2015, he landed a job as a pilot at the aviation company Dea Aviation. At first, the work consisted mostly of transporting important things from A to B – for example, hearts that had to be sent to various hospitals. Later, the company expanded its tasks and monitored, among other things, migrant flows in the Mediterranean. Ralph Salvini played a central role in the development and was quickly promoted.

In 2015, after getting the job at Dea Aviation, Ralph Salvini divorced Martina's mother. He then married a new woman and divorced again.

Around 2022, Ralph Salvini met the woman Phoebe in the town of Belper, near Manchester, where he lived with his daughter, Martina. They fell in love, and Phoebe was very fond of Martina, who she looked after when Ralph Salvini was away with work.

The disadvantage of the pilot job was that you were often away for long periods at a time. At one point, Ralph Salvini decided to change to a position at Dea Aviation, which meant that he would no longer have to fly. In return, he could spend more time with his daughter.

But Ralph Salvini loved to fly. To keep flying, he started freelancing as a ferry pilot, ferrying empty small single-engine planes from one place in the world to another.

The trips in the small planes often took him to the United States, various places in Europe – and all the way to India. It typically took between three to four days to deliver a plane.

On his routes across the Atlantic, he often flew over Greenland. He and his father's WhatsApp chat thread was filled with pictures of the Northern Lights, ice caps and Icelandic volcanoes. His father sometimes thought it looked dangerous.

And it turned out to be a not entirely safe job.

In 2021, Ralph Salvini was supposed to transport a plane from the USA to Europe. He was heading east over Canada when the engine suddenly stopped. He had no map to show him where to try to make an emergency landing. When he got close enough to the ground, he spotted a frozen lake, which he aimed for.

The plane crashed into the lake and was smashed – but Ralph Salvini was unharmed. He called his family in the UK, his mother in Pisa and his father, who was in Bangkok at the time.

"I'm fine," he said.

His father thought his voice sounded fine and normal.

Later, it turned out that there had been a technical problem with the plane that had prevented the fuel supply to the engine.

Ralph brushed off the incident and seemed quite calm and confident in continuing his side job as a 'ferry pilot'. Just a few days after the accident, he was back at his second job at Dea Aviation.

A fatal plane crash

In early 2025, Ralph Salvini was laid off from his position at Dea Aviation, and he then threw his energy into his career as a 'ferry pilot'. He started his own small business, and he dreamed of employing a few people under him in time.

Ralph Salvini had built up a good reputation for his skills as a pilot, and he got many contracts with people and companies that had to transport and deliver aircraft. But he tried to stick to between two and three trips a month.

At some point during the autumn of last year, he accepted a job where he would transport a new Textron Aviation Cessna T182 fixed-wing aircraft from Kansas in the USA to Warsaw in Poland. The trip, as so many times before, would take him over Greenland.

He took off from the USA and was to fly via Canada to South Greenland before flying on to Iceland and then to Europe. But when he was to cross the Davis Strait to Narsarsuaq on Saturday 25 October, there was bad weather in South Greenland. Due to the dangerous conditions, Ralph Salvini and the aircraft had to land in Nuuk instead. But the weather was also bad here.

The same day, Ralph Salvini's relatives were informed that he was no longer answering the radio. He was also not answering the phone, the family could see. Two days later, on March 27, they were told that the plane had been located on the Sermitsiaq Island near Nuuk. The plane had collided with the mountain at an altitude of almost 1 kilometer.

It had been a fatal plane crash, the family was told.

Due to the weather conditions and very low cloud cover, it took almost two weeks before the body was recovered. Then it was even longer before Ralph Salvini's body arrived in Copenhagen and was cremated. Here the urn and ashes are today, waiting for the family to come to Denmark to say their last goodbyes.

To mark Ralph Salvini's death, a ceremony was held for close friends and relatives at the house in Belper outside Manchester.

Ralph Salvini's father, who is Catholic, has dedicated a Catholic mass (the central service in the Catholic Church, ed) to the memory of his son every month since the plane crash.

April 25th will be six months since Ralph Salvini passed away. He was 45 years and ten months old when he died. He leaves behind his daughter, his girlfriend, his mother, father and two sisters.