A Pan Am 747 with 243 passengers and 15 crew on board crashed on the small town of Lockerbie just north of the Scottish border with England. The plane left London Heathrow at 6pm GMT en route for New York’s JFK. The flight disappeared from Prestwick’s Air Traffic Control Center’s radar screen just after 7pm.
In total all 258 people on board the flight, and 11 people on the ground died. Wreckage was scattered across an area of over 800 square miles, and the impact reached 1.6 on the Richter Scale.
The plane had been flying at 31,000 feet when it came down. The crash was subseqently found to have been caused by a bomb, and Abdelbaset ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was jailed for life in January 2001 following an 84 day trial in Holland, held under Scottish law.
Tags: air traffic control, crash, England, lockerbie, london heathrow, radar screen, richter scale, scottish border, traffic control center, wreckage