Final horrifying moments before Pan Am Flight 103 crash (1988)

Daily Mirror ^ | May 18 | Jackie Annett Features Writer and Vikki White Features Writer

[RandFan]

When Pan Am Flight 103 set off from Heathrow to New York, its passengers and crew were looking forward to returning home to celebrate Christmas - but tragically, they never made it

The Lockerbie bombing where 270 people sadly lost their lives is still the deadliest terror attack in the history of the UK, even though it took place more than 30 yeas ago.

It was 21 December, 1988, when the Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its flight while travelling over Lockerbie, with the wreckage of the plain raining down on the houses below.

And it wasn't just the passengers who lost their lives - the small Scottish town lost 11 residents, including a family of four, Jack and Rosalind Somerville and their children, Paul, 12, and Lindsay, 10, who died when a section of the aircraft fell on their home in Sherwood Crescent.

In Lockerbie, residents opened their front doors to see 259 bodies dropping out of the sky, landing on the street in front of them. After the bomb exploded, everything went dark and eerily quiet in the town.

The 243 passengers boarding their pre-Christmas flight at London Heathrow or via Frankfurt in Germany came from 21 countries and ranged in age from two months old to 82.

Forty per cent of the 270 total victims were aged 25 or younger, many of them children, while two-thirds were American

[PAR35]

So many great airlines have gone out of business, not just Pan Am, TWA too.

Braniff.

[SmokingJoe]

Yes.