Word: crashing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...passengers and crew members. Long before dawn, emergency rescue teams realized that everybody on the plane had perished, along with at least 22 people on the ground. In the grim history of aviation disasters, Flight 103 made the record books on two counts: as Britain's deadliest air crash and as Pan Am's worst accident involving only one plane...
...first, investigators believed the disaster might have been caused by massive structural failure. Though Boeing 747s are among the sturdiest passenger planes in the world, a Japan Air Lines 747 crashed on a domestic flight in 1985 after a rear bulkhead ruptured as the result of a faulty repair job, killing 520 of the 524 aboard. But one important difference between the Japan Air Lines crash and the Pan Am tragedy was that the pilot of the Japanese plane was able to talk to ground control for half an hour as he tried unsuccessfully to land his mortally wounded craft...
...plane's age and length of service, however, most aviation experts would not rate the aircraft as particularly worn or fatigued. Moreover, the airline pointed out that the plane had been fully refitted 15 months ago and was checked and serviced in San Francisco only a week before the crash...
Inevitably, that left the horrific prospect that Flight 103 had been deliberately blown out of the skies. David Kyd, public relations director of the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association, noted the similarities between the Pan Am crash and that of an Air India 747 that disappeared into the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland in June 1985, killing all 329 people aboard. The subsequent investigation, aided by the underwater recovery of the plane's flight recorder, or "black box," determined that a bomb in the forward cargo hold had blown off the front section of the aircraft. Sikh extremists...
...Finnish government subsequently said it knew the identity of the telephone tipster and did not take the warning seriously, the FAA was sufficiently concerned to advise all major U.S. carriers, including Pan Am, of the threat, though the news was not passed on to the general public. After the crash, some bereaved relatives of the victims expressed anger that neither the Government nor the airline had seen fit to caution the public. In response, Government agencies pointed out that they frequently receive warnings of terrorist activity, most of which are meaningless; in fact, more than 100 advisories of this kind...