Three decades later, Lockerbie’s hidden angels relive the rescue of their brethren’s remainsand bringing them to kever Yisrael
Air-traffic controller Alan Topp sat with his eyes fixed to the radar screen, watching the white marker indicating that Pan Am Flight 103, which had taken off from London’s Heathrow airport 27 minutes before, had crossed into Scottish airspace on its voyage across the Atlantic to New York. It was a pretty standard route, nothing too interesting that December night over three decades ago, but suddenly, Topp shot to full attention: The radar screen showed not just one blip where Flight 103 should have been, but four. Topp tried to contact the pilot of the aircraft, but there was no response. He buzzed the oceanic controllers responsible for the plane’s Atlantic crossing, but they too had lost contact with the plane. As his colleagues gathered around his screen, they would soon learn that those four blips represented the cockpit, the fuselage, an engine, and a wing hurtling to earth. A bomb had detonated from a Samsonite suitcase in the forward baggage hold, tearing the Boeing 747 apart at 31,000 feet in the air. Emergency procedures were never initiated, no oxygen masks had dropped down, and the cockpit levers were still set to cruise control.
Just before 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 21, 1988, as the mammoth Boeing 747 rolled onto Heathrow’s Runway 27-Right, Captain Jim MacQuarrie, an experienced flyer with almost 11,000 flight hours under his belt, eased the four throttles forward and the 350-ton steel bird — nicknamed Clipper Maid of the Seas — flew into the winter night.
Once they were level at 31,000 feet, the pilots radioed in for clearance to cross the Atlantic and aim for New York. The flight attendants started to serve drinks.
The VIPs had settled into their business-class lounges and the economy passengers had arranged their limbs in the confined space. Thirty-five of them were students from Syracuse University — some of them Jewish — flying home after completing an exchange program. There was a party of US intelligence specialists on board, as well as a few well-known names: Bernt Carlsson, the UN commissioner of Namibia, was on his way to attend the signing of the New York Accords, slated to take place the following day. James Fuller, a US executive for Volkswagen, was on his way back from a meeting with other VW executives in Germany. Matthew Gannon, the CIA’s deputy station chief from Beirut, was safely ensconced in Business class seat 14J.
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