Commercial Flights That Were Deliberately Shot Down

Pan Am Flight 103: Lockerbie Bombing

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Pan Am Flight 103 was Pan American World Airways third of the three daily scheduled flight form Heathrow International in London to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. In one of its fateful flight on December 21, 1988 it was destroyed by a bomb, killing 243 passengers and 16 crew members. The aircraft – Boeing 747 121 named Clipper Maid of the Seas – was crashed unto a small Scotland town of Lockerbie, killing 11 residents. In their remembrance, this major air disaster is also called Lockerbie Bombing. The years of investigation that followed resulted to the conviction of a Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi in 2001, by which he maintained innocence.  The motive generally attributed to Libya was due to a series of military confrontations with U.S. Navy in the 1980’s in the Gulf of Sidra, over which Libya claimed as part of their territorial waters. The bombing was denied by Libyan authorities denied the carrying the bombing until 2003 when it finally admitted responsibility in a letter presented to the president of the United Nations Security Council. However, Felicity Barringer of the New York Times said that the letter had “the general language that lacked any expression of remorse” for the people killed in the bombing. Libya eventually gave to the family of the victims a sizeable amount of monetary compensation. Still maintaining innocence, Al Megrahi was released from incarceration by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds as he is suffering from malignant prostate cancer that allows him around three (3) months more to live according to his doctors. Over this move, Scotland authorities received strong objections from the United States.

Those people killed in these deliberate air disasters certainly did not deserve their senseless deaths, specially the more innocent children.  These are plainly hard to comprehend, and the simplest thing we can do is to hope that these grim human errors are never repeated again.