Word: grounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toms River, N.J., is fertile ground for what the publishing business calls a "true crime" book. Such a product should feature a victim and killer, preferably related to each other, who share the same demographics and conventions as the middle-class readership. The appeal of this sort of thing is obvious, as Joe McGinniss proved in Fatal Vision (1983), the best seller about U.S. Army Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician convicted in 1979 of murdering his wife and children...
...grisly shower consisted of the remains of a 747 jetliner, Pan American Flight 103 from London to New York, and its 258 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...
Less than two minutes later, the fire storm began over Lockerbie. Said George Gilston, who was walking his dog when the jet fell out of the sky: "I heard a noise like thunder, and then I saw the outline of a plane dropping, nose down, straight into the ground." Peter O'Brien was driving by on the A74 highway. "The whole sky lit up as though it was daylight," he said later. "The car behind me was engulfed in flames, and houses were suddenly on fire, as if petrol had been sprayed over them. It was an incredible inferno." Recalled...
...Gazing up at the electronic arrivals board, they read an ominous message next to the flight number: SEE AGT. When they found a Pan Am agent, they were led into a lounge and told the news. One grief-stricken woman, shouting "My baby! My baby!," threw herself on the ground...
...aircraft, running low on fuel, was asking for clearance to land at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan. I heard someone calling out numbers over the radio in Russian, but his Armenian accent made them difficult to understand. The Soviet pilot was obviously having trouble comprehending the response too, and asked ground control several times to repeat the coordinates...