Pan Am Flight 103
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"PA 103" redirects here. For the state highway, see Pennsylvania Route 103.
"Flight 103" redirects here. For other uses, see Flight 103 (disambiguation).
 Nose section of Clipper Maid of the Seas (N739PA) | |
| Occurrence summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | 21 December 1988 |
| Type | Bombing |
| Site | Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland |
| Passengers | 243 |
| Crew | 16 |
| Fatalities | 270 (259 in aircraft, 11 on ground) |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Aircraft type | Boeing 747-121 |
| Aircraft name | Clipper Maid of the Seas |
| Operator | Pan Am |
| Tail number | N739PA |
| Flight origin | London Heathrow Airport |
| Stopover | John F. Kennedy International Airport |
| Destination | Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport |
 | Wikinews has related news: Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi released on compassionate grounds |
Pan Am Flight 103 was Pan American World Airways' third daily scheduled transatlantic flight from London Heathrow Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. On Wednesday 21 December 1988, the aircraft flying this route—a Boeing 747-121 named Clipper Maid of the Seas—was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members.[1] Eleven people in Lockerbie, in southern Scotland, were killed as large sections of the plane fell in and around the town, bringing total fatalities to 270. As a result, the event has been named by the media as the Lockerbie Bombing.
Contents[show] |
[edit] Criminal inquiry
Known as the Lockerbie bombing and the Lockerbie air disaster in the UK, it was described by Scotland's Lord Advocate as the UK's largest criminal inquiry led by the smallest police force in Britain, namely, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary.[2]
After a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, during which 15,000 witness statements were taken, indictments for murder were issued on 13 November 1991 against Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, the LAA station manager in Luqa Airport, Malta. United Nations sanctions against Libya and protracted negotiations with the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi secured the handover of the accused on 5 April 1999 to Scottish police at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, having been chosen as a neutral venue for their trial.
Both accused persons chose not to give evidence in court. On 31 January 2001, Megrahi was convicted of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges and sentenced to 27 years in prison but Fhimah was acquitted. Megrahi's appeal against his conviction was refused on 14 March 2002, and his application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible in July 2003. On 23 September 2003, Megrahi applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) for his conviction to be reviewed, and on 28 June 2007 the SCCRC announced its decision to refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh after it found he "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice".[3]
Megrahi served just over 8½ years of his sentence in Greenock Prison, throughout which time he maintained that he was innocent of the charges against him. He was released from prison on compassionate grounds on 20 August 2009.[4]
[edit] Aircraft
Pan Am Flight 103 was a Boeing 747-100 named Clipper Maid of the Seas. The jumbo jet was the fifteenth 747 built and was delivered in February 1970,[5] one month after the first 747 entered service with Pan Am.
[edit] Explosion
At 19:01 GMT, airtraffic controller Alan Topp watched Flight 103 approach the corner of the Solway Firthtransponder code or "squawk"—0357 and flight level—310.[citation needed] At this point Clipper Maid of the Seas was flying at 31,000 feet (9,400 m) on a heading of 316 degrees magnetic, and at a speed of 313 kn (580 km/h) calibrated airspeed, at 19:02:46.9. Subsequent analysis of the radar returns by RSRE on his screen and observed as it crossed the coast at 19:02 GMT. On his scope, the aircraft showed concluded that the aircraft was tracking 321° (grid) and travelling at a ground speed of 434 knots (804 km/h).
[edit] Contact is lost
At that moment, Clipper Maid of the Seas' "squawk" flickered off. Topp tried to make contact with Captain MacQuarrie, with no response. Tom Fraser tried as well and asked a nearby KLM flight to do the same, but there was no reply. Where there should have been one radar echo on Topp's screen, there were four, and as the seconds passed, the echoes began to fan out.[6][7][page needed] Comparison of the cockpit voice recorder[8] British Airways pilot Captain Robin Chamberlain, flying the Glasgow–London shuttle near Carlisle, called Scottish authorities to report that he could see a huge fire on the ground. The destruction of PA103 continued on Topp's screen, by now full of returns moving eastwards with the wind.[9] with the radar returns showed that eight seconds after the explosion, the wreckage had a 1-nautical-mile (1.9 km) spread.
[edit] Disintegration of aircraft
Lockerbie
Pan Am Flight 103 crash site in Scotland
The explosion punched a 20-inch (0.51 m)-wide hole on the left side of the fuselage, almost directly under the "P" in the "Pan Am" logo painted in the fuselage. The disintegration of the aircraft was rapid.
Investigators from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were lowered into the cockpit in the wreckage before it was moved from the crash site, and while the bodies of the flight crew were still in the cockpit. They concluded that no emergency procedures had been started. The pressure control and fuel switches were both set for cruise, and the crew had not used their oxygen masks, which would have been required within five seconds of a rapid depressurisation of the aircraft.[7][page needed]Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) of the British Department for Transport concluded that the nose of the aircraft separated from the main section within three seconds of the explosion.[citation needed] Investigators from the
The cockpit voice recorder, a recording device in the tail section of the aircraft, was found in a field by police searchers within 24 hours of the bombing. There was no evidence of a distress signal: a 180-millisecond hissing noise could be heard as the explosion destroyed the aircraft's communications centre.[citation needed] Although the explosion was in the aircraft hold, the effect was increased by the large difference between aircraft cabin pressure and the outside air pressure (the latter is about a quarter of the former).
Shock waves from the blast ricocheted back from the fuselage skin in the direction of the bomb, meeting pulses still coming from the initial explosion. This produced Mach stem shock waves, calculated to be 25% faster than, and double the power of, the waves from the explosion itself.[7][page needed] These Mach stem waves pulsing through the ductwork bounced off overhead luggage racks and other hard surfaces, jolting the passengers.[citation needed] A section of the 747's roof several feet above the point of detonation peeled away. The nerve centre of a 747, from which all the navigation and communication systems are controlled, is below the cockpit, separated from the forward cargo hold by a bulkhead wall. Investigators concluded that the force of the explosion broke through this wall and shook the flight-control cables, causing the front section of the fuselage to begin to roll, pitch, and yaw.[citation needed]
The shock waves of the explosion rebounded from one side of the aircraft to the other, running down the length of the fuselage through the air-conditioning ducts and splitting the fuselage open. This in turn snapped the reinforcing belt that secured the front section to the row of windows on the left side and it began to break away. Then the whole front section of the aircraft, containing the flight deck with crew and the first class section, broke away altogether, flying upwards and to the right striking the No. 3 Pratt & Whitney engine as it snapped off.[citation needed] With the disruption of the steering cables the aircraft went into a steep dive. When the fuselage disintegrated the cabin depressurised to a quarter of ground-level pressure, leaving the passengers fighting for breath. Because of the sudden change in air pressure, the gases inside the passengers' bodies would have expanded to four times their normal volume, causing their lungs to swell and then collapse.
The explosion knocked out the power, plunging the passenger cabin into darkness. A Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry, which opened on 1 October 1990, heard that, when the cockpit broke off, the fuselage was now an open cylinder. Tornado-force winds tore up the aisles slamming into the chest making it even more difficult to breathe and stripping the clothes off the passengers. Some were thrown to the rear. Other people and objects not fixed down were blown out of the aircraft into the night at temperatures of −46 °C (−51 °F), their 31,000-foot (9,400 m) fall through the nighttime troposphere lasting about two minutes.[7][page needed] Some passengers remained attached to the fuselage by their seat belts, crashing to earth strapped to their seats.[citation needed]
Although the passengers would have lost consciousness through lack of oxygen, forensic examiners believe some of them might have regained consciousness as they fell toward oxygen-rich lower altitudes. Forensic pathologist Dr. William G. Eckert, director of the Milton Helpern International Center of Forensic Sciences at Wichita State University, who examined the autopsy evidence, told Scottish police he believed the flight crew, some of the flight attendants, and 147 other passengers survived the bomb blast and depressurisation of the aircraft, and may have been alive on impact.[citation needed] None of these passengers showed signs of injury from the explosion itself, or from the decompression and disintegration of the aircraft. Forensic tests on some of the bodies suggested that their heartbeats may have continued after the explosion, and David McMullon, a helicopter pilot who was involved in the search for bodies, claimed to have found one victim who was clutching a handful of grass.[10]
[edit] Fuselage (wing section) impact
Investigators believe that within three seconds of the explosion, the cockpit, fuselage, and No. 3 engine were falling separately. The fuselage continued moving forward and down until it reached 19,000 ft (5,800 m), at which point its dive became almost vertical.[11]
As it descended, the fuselage broke into smaller pieces, with the section attached to the wings landing first (46.5 seconds after the explosion)[12] in Sherwood Crescent, Lockerbie, where the 200,000 lb (91,000 kg) of kerosene contained inside ignited. The resultant fireball destroyed a number of houses and was so intense that little remained of the left wing of the aircraft. No remains were ever found of any of the passengers who were seated over this section of the wing. Eleven residents on the ground perished in the inferno.
Investigators were able to determine that both wings had landed in the crater after counting the number of large steel flap drive jackscrews that were later found there[7][page needed] - indeed there were no finds of wing structure outside the crater itself.[13] The British Geological Survey at nearby Eskdalemuir registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale.
[edit] Victims
Nationality | Passengers | Crew | On Ground | Total |
 Argentina | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
 Belgium | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Bolivia | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Canada | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
 France | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
 Germany | 3 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
 Hungary | 4 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
 India | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
 Ireland | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
 Israel | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Italy | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
 Jamaica | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Japan | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Philippines | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 South Africa | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Spain | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Sweden | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
 Switzerland | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 Trinidad and Tobago | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 United Kingdom | 31 | 1 | 11 | 43 |
 United States | 179 | 11 | 0 | 190 |
| Total | 243 | 16 | 11 | 270 |
[edit] Passengers and crew
All 243 passengers and 16 crew members were killed. Eleven residents of Lockerbie also died. Of the total of 270 fatalities, 190 were American citizens and 43 British subjects.[14][15] No more than 4 of the remaining 37 victims of the bombing came from any one of the 19 other countries.[15][16]
Dr Eckert told Scottish police that distinctive marks on Captain MacQuarrie's thumb suggested he had been hanging onto the yoke of the plane as it descended, and may have been alive when the plane crashed. The captain, first officer, flight engineer, a flight attendant and a number of first-class passengers were found still strapped to their seats inside the nose section when it crashed in a field by a tiny church in the village of Tundergarth. The inquest heard that the flight attendant was alive when found by a farmer's wife, but died before her rescuer could summon help.[7][page needed]
[edit] Notable passengers
Prominent among the passenger victims was the 50-year-old UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, who would have attended the signing ceremony at UN headquarters on 22 December 1988 of the New York Accords.[17]
[edit] Students and families
Thirty-five students from Syracuse University, four from Colgate University, four from Brown University, two from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and two from the State University of New York at Oswego were on board, flying home from overseas study in London. There was also one student from Hampshire College flying home from a field study in Nigeria.
Ten of the victims were residents of Long Island—including father and son, John and Sean Mulroy—and were returning home for seasonal celebrations with families and friends, as reported by Newsday of 27 December 1988.
Student Christopher Jones (20, of Claverack New York) was also lost. His 18-year-old sister had died the previous January of natural causes, and thus Jones' parents had now lost their only two children within less than a year of each other. Glenn Bouckley, (27, British subject, Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire) and his wife Paula (29, American, of Liverpool, New York) had been married for just two years when they died.
Five members of the Dixit-Rattan family, including 3-year-old Suruchi Rattan, were flying to Detroit, Michigan, from New Delhi. They were supposed to be on Pan Am Flight 67, which had left Frankfurt for New York earlier in the day, but one of the children had fallen ill with breathing difficulties, and the pilot had taken the plane back to the gate to allow the family to disembark. The family was then transferred to a later flight to continue their journey; this was how they came to be on Pan Am 103.
Suruchi was wearing a bright red kurta and salwar—a knee-length tunic and matching trousers—for her journey. She became associated with a note left with flowers outside Lockerbie town hall that said, "To the little girl in the red dress who lies here who made my flight from Frankfurt such fun. You didn't deserve this. God Bless, Chas."[18]
[edit] U.S. intelligence officers
There were at least four U.S. intelligence officers on the passenger list, with rumours, never confirmed, of a fifth onboard. The presence of these men on the flight later gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories, in which one or more of them were said to have been targeted.[19]
Matthew Gannon, the CIA's deputy station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, was sitting in Clipper Class, Pan Am's version of business class,[20] seat 14J. Major Chuck "Tiny" McKee, an army officer on secondment to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Beirut, sat behind Gannon in the center aisle in seat 15F. Two Diplomatic Security Service special agents, acting as bodyguards to Gannon and McKee, were sitting in economy: Ronald Lariviere, a security officer from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, was in 20H, and Daniel O'Connor, a security officer from the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, sat five rows behind Lariviere in 25H, both men seated over the right wing. The four men had flown together out of Cyprus that morning. There was also a Department of Justice Special Agent on the flight, Assistant Deputy Director Michael S. Bernstein.
Also on board, in seat 53K at the back of the plane, was 21-year-old Khalid Nazir Jaafar, who had moved from Lebanon to Detroit with his family, where his father ran a successful auto-repair business. Because of his Lebanese background, and because he was returning from having visited relatives there, Jaafar's name later figured prominently in the investigation into the bombing, as well as in conspiracy theories concerning the Lockerbie bombing.[citation needed] This caused his family very great additional distress.[citation needed]
[edit] Lockerbie residents
On the ground, 11 Lockerbie residents were killed when the wing section hit 13 Sherwood Crescent at more than 800 km/h (500 mph) and exploded, creating a crater 47 m (154 ft) long and with a volume of 560 m3[21] vaporizing the house and its occupants, Dora and Maurice Henry. Several other houses and their foundations were completely destroyed, and 21 others were damaged so badly they had to be demolished. Four members of one family, Jack and Rosalind Somerville and their children Paul and Lynsey, died when their house at 15 Sherwood Crescent exploded. (730 cu yd),
Kathleen Flannigan, age 41, Thomas Flannigan, 44, and their daughter Joanne, 10, were killed by the explosion in their house 16 Sherwood Crescent. Their son Steven, 14, saw the fireball engulf his home from a neighbour's garage where he had gone to repair his sister's bicycle.
The fireball rose above the houses and moved toward the nearby Glasgow–Carlisle A74 dual carriageway, scorching cars in the southbound lanes and leading motorists and local residents to believe that there had been a meltdown at the nearby Chapelcross nuclear power station. Father Patrick Keegans, Lockerbie's Roman Catholic priest, was preparing to visit his neighbours at around 7 p.m. that evening when the plane destroyed their home. There was nothing left of them to bury. The priest's home, at 1 Sherwood Crescent, was the only house that was neither destroyed by the impact or gutted by fire.[22]
For many days, Lockerbie residents lived with the sight of bodies in their gardens and in the streets, as forensic workers photographed and tagged the location of each body to help determine the exact position and force of the on-board explosion, by coordinating information about each passenger's assigned seat, type of injury, and where they had landed. Local resident Bunty Galloway told authors Geraldine Sheridan and Thomas Kenning (1993):
"A boy was lying at the bottom of the steps on to the road. A young laddie with brown socks and blue trousers on. Later that evening my son-in-law asked for a blanket to cover him. I didn't know he was dead. I gave him a lamb's wool travelling rug thinking I'd keep him warm. Two more girls were lying dead across the road, one of them bent over garden railings. It was just as though they were sleeping. The boy lay at the bottom of my stairs for days. Every time I came back to my house for clothes he was still there. 'My boy is still there,' I used to tell the waiting policeman. Eventually on Saturday I couldn't take it no more. 'You got to get my boy lifted,' I told the policeman. That night he was moved."[23]
Despite being advised by their governments not to travel to Lockerbie, many of the passengers' relatives, most of them from the U.S., arrived there within days to identify their loved ones. Volunteers from Lockerbie set up and manned canteens, which stayed open 24 hours a day, where relatives, soldiers, police officers and social workers could find free sandwiches, hot meals, coffee, and someone to talk to. The people of the town washed, dried, and ironed every piece of clothing that was found once the police had determined they were of no forensic value, so that as many items as possible could be returned to the relatives. The BBC's Scottish correspondent, Andrew Cassell, reported on the tenth anniversary of the bombing that the townspeople had "opened their homes and hearts" to the relatives, bearing their own losses "stoically and with enormous dignity", and that the bonds forged then continue to this day.[24]
[edit] People booked who did not board
There were instances of people who were supposed to board Pan Am Flight 103, but arrived too late to board the flight, escaping the fate of those on board.
[edit] The potential "271st victim"
Jaswant Basuta, an Indian national, was checked in for Pan Am Flight 103, but arrived at the boarding gate too late. Having attended a family wedding in Belfast, Basuta was returning to New York where the 47-year old car mechanic was about to start a new job. Friends and relatives from nearby Southall came to see him off at the airport terminal, and bought him drinks in the upstairs bar. When "gate closing" flashed on the departure screen, Basuta hurried through security and passport control and sprinted to the departure gate, but the room was empty except for Pan Am ground staff who denied him access to the aircraft.
Basuta was initially considered a suspect as his checked baggage had been on the flight without him. After questioning at Heathrow police station, he was released without charge. Twenty years later, in an interview with the BBC, Basuta talked about his narrow escape from death: "I should have been the 271st victim and I still feel terrible for all the other people who died."[25]
[edit] Robotics Society
David Calkins, head of the Robotics Society of America and President of the international RoboGames, was delayed from boarding the Pan Am Flight 103 due to a delay while verifying his military leave orders in Frankfurt, Germany. This delay caused him to miss his connection to the doomed Lockerbie flight. It was not until he reached his final destination in MSP days later that he learned of the terrorist attack.
[edit] South African foreign minister
The South African foreign minister Pik Botha and a minor delegation of 22 was supposed to board Pan Am 103, but managed to take the earlier Pan Am 101 flight. They were on their way to New York to sign the tripartite agreement whereby South Africa agreed to hand control of Namibia to the United Nations. The UN commissioner appointed to take over, Bernt Carlsson however was among the victims of flight 103 as mentioned above.
[edit] Celebrities
The R&B singing group known as The Four Tops was scheduled to board Pan Am Flight 103 to return to the United States for Christmas after completing their European tour, but were late getting out of a recording session and overslept.[26][27]
Rock musician John Lydon (“Johnny Rotten”) of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. and his wife, Nora, were also booked on Pan Am Flight 103, but missed it due to delays.[28]
[edit] Prior alerts
A number of alerts were posted shortly before the bombing.
[edit] Helsinki warning
On 5 December 1988 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin saying that on that day a man with an Arabic accent had telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and had told them that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within the next two weeks by someone associated with the Abu Nidal Organization. He said a Finnish woman would carry the bomb on board as an unwitting courier.[29]
The anonymous warning was taken seriously by the U.S. government. The State Department cabled the bulletin to dozens of embassies. The FAA sent it to all U.S. carriers, including Pan Am, which had charged each of the passengers a $5 security surcharge, promising a "program that will screen passengers, employees, airport facilities, baggage and aircraft with unrelenting thoroughness" (The Independent, 29 March 1990); the security team in Frankfurt found the warning hidden under a pile of papers on a desk the day after the bombing.[7][page needed] One of the Frankfurt security screeners, whose job it was to spot explosive devices under X-ray, told ABC News that she had first learned what Semtex (a plastic explosive) was during her ABC interview 11 months after the bombing (Prime Time Live, November 1989).
On 13 December, the warning was posted on bulletin boards in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and eventually distributed to the entire American community there, including journalists and businessmen. As a result, a number of people allegedly booked on carriers other than Pan Am, leaving empty seats on PA103 that were later sold cheaply in "bucket shops".
[edit] PLO warning
Just days before the sabotage of the aircraft, security forces in a number of European countries, including Britain, were put on alert after a warning from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that extremists might launch terrorist attacks to undermine the then ongoing dialogue between the United States and the PLO.[30]
[edit] Claims of responsibility
According to a CIA analysis dated 22 December 1988, several groups were quick to claim responsibility in telephone calls in the United States and Europe:
- A male caller claimed that a group called the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution had destroyed the plane in retaliation for the U.S. shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf the previous July.
- A caller claiming to represent the Islamic Jihad organization told ABC News in New York that the group had planted the bomb.
- The Ulster Defence Association allegedly issued a telephone claim, apparently its first political move in 80 years, and probably came about from a demand from MI5 that the PIRA, who have never used air terrorism not be implicated.[clarification needed]
After finishing this list, the author stated, "We consider the claims from the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution as the most credible one received so far". The analysis concluded, "We cannot assign responsibility for this tragedy to any terrorist group at this time. We anticipate that, as often happens, many groups will seek to claim credit".[31][32]
