After you read my account, if you have comments, stories, or anything on Pan Am 103 or TWA 800 that you want the web to hear, please go to the response form.
Please also visit the page on the 10th anniversary of Pan Am 103 which I have added recently.
This part of my home page is dedicated to the 270 people who died on Pan Am flight 103 and the 230 on TWA flight 800. First, about the Pan Am crash:
The Pan Am 747-100 was about 35-40 min. after takeoff from London's Heathrow airport on December 21, 1988 when an explosion ripped through the plane. It broke into three pieces: the wings, the main plane fuselage, and the cockpit/first class lounge. The pieces of the plane landed on the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 11 of the residents there. The explosion was traced to a piece of luggage loaded onto an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, Germany then loaded onto a Pan Am 727 bound for London, and then the 747 clipper "Maid of the Seas" which was bound for New York City, USA. If the 747 had taken off on time, the bomb might have blown up in the Atlantic Ocean, and we might never have known it was a bomb that caused the accident.
I was only 7 years old at the time of the accident, so I remember nothing of the incident. I didn't learn of it until recently when I was at the library looking for books on airplane crashes and stumbled upon two excellent books on the crash, my favorite being "Their Darkest Day" (it happened on the shortest day of the year). It is by Matthew Cox and Tom Foster.
There is another very excellent page on Pan Am 103 with far more information and links than I have here. Click here to link to the other page, which is at Geocities.
The second airplane tragedy I will talk about here is the recent crash of TWA flight 800. Everyone knows the story, but here goes:
The 747-100 jet was bound for Paris from New York-JFK airport when it disappeared from air traffic controller's screens at about 8:30 E.D.T. on July 17, 1996. There had been no distress call to the ATCs.
Here is a list of the victims of TWA flight 800.
Here's a picture of N93119, the actual plane that was TWA flight 800 that fateful day, before the crash.
To me, this crash bears many similarities to the Pan Am bombing. A large jet (747-100) leaves the terminal, takes off, and, not long into the flight, disappears off of ATC screens, with no distress call.
On the morning of July 18, the next day, my mom woke me up at 7 AM to the tune of that a 747 had exploded. This got me out of bed faster than I believe I have even gotten up! I ran, got the paper, poured some Lucky Charms, and went downstairs to watch the news coverage. (My 9 year old brother was watching "That's Warner Brothers" on TV upstairs.) That is one of the only crashes of a jet that I remember hearing about. The best place on the net to get coverage of the crash and surrounding events is http://www.cnn.com/US. If you have a comment, question, of correction of the information above, please e-mail me.
Some other sites about flight 800 are:
http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/CRASH/TWA/twa.html -- Very good site for TWA 800!
http://www.multipull.com/twacasefile/default.htm -- Excellent resource site for TWA 800
http://www.chal.demon.co.uk/ana/ -- This is a memorial to one of the passengers on TWA 800.
http://members.aol.com/hseaman275/families.html
This news was just added to this page on 12-18-96. It is the copy of the e-mail that has been circulating on the internet about the missle that may have caused the crash of TWA flight 800. This is a rumor that I picked up from someone who came to my page, and I got it off the CNN page on the net.
This news was added on 10-1-97. I just heard on the news that the crash of TWA 800 is looking less and less like something that was caused by a missle. I disagree in some ways with the missle theory and in some ways I agree. The many reports I have heard of the sightings make me lean toward this theory, and also the way that there was no distress call at all. Why should our government admit that it was wrong? I would still fly on the airlines, but we need to face up to what really happened on that day in July 1996.
