The Truth Behind The Pan Am Flight 103 Air Crash Investigation

By Tanisha Berg


Most Baby Boomers today can tell you precisely where they were and what they were doing the day John F Kennedy was shot down in Dallas in 1963. Similarly, those who remember a black day in December 1988 will remember where they were the day a Pan American airliner crashed into the quiet Scottish village of Lockerbie. While the Libyan government eventually owned up to being behind the incident, the Pan Am Flight 103 air crash investigation ruled that the airline had been guilty of wilful misconduct. They had not matched up every piece of baggage with its rightful owner prior to take-off from Frankfurt Airport.

The pre-flight inspection had turned up no problems with the airliner before it departed from the airport in Frankfurt. Evidence later revealed that the plain had been struck by a bomb from the charred remains of that part of the airliner's hold. Bombs continue to be a menace to the aviation industry. They are most often found to have been hidden in someone's luggage.

It is not always a bomb that brings a commercial passenger airliner crashing to the ground. Since the 1940s, passenger aircraft have been shot down using major artillery. Not a decade has gone by since then without at least one report of an airliner being brought down in this way.

In 2007, a plane that was coming for a landing at a U. S. Military base in Balad, Iraq, crashed. Thirty-four people were killed and one was seriously injured when the Antonov An-26 came down. Officials tried to pass it off as a result of bad weather, but there was evidence to suggest to some people that the aircraft had been attacked by a missile.

In September 1993, there were three separate incidents on consecutive days. The first was on September 21, when a flight from Sochi, Russia, was shot down by an SAM, crashing into the Black Sea. All 22 passengers and five crew perished. The next day, a plane carrying soldiers from Georgia crashed onto the runway after being shot down. Here, 108 out of 132 souls on board died. The final crash took place on September 23, 1993. A mortar struck the plane while passengers were boarding. One crew member was killed.

An Iranian Air Force C-130, carrying Iranian embassy staff, was shot down in 1994 by American military forces. All 19 passengers and 13 crew, perished. That same year, the presidents of the African states of Burundi and Rwanda were reportedly shot down in the same plane near the Rwandan capital. The plane is believed to have been shot down by rocket fire.

In 1980, a DC-9-10/15 series airliner was plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica, off the Italian coast of Naples. The then-president of Italy accused the French of killing all 81 passengers. It was not until 2013 that an Italian court ruled conclusively that the craft had been shot down by a missile.

The first known occasion when civilian passengers were killed in a military-motivated crime was on June 14, 1940. Here, Passengers flying from Tallinn, a city in Estonia, were shot down by Soviet torpedo bombers while en route to Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The Winter War, a military conflict between Finland and the Soviets, had ended just three months previously.




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