Three decades later, Lockerbie’s hidden angels relive the rescue of their brethren’s remains and bringing them to kever Yisrael

Photos: Family Archives

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.

And 56-year-old Joseph Miller of Woodmere — senior partner in a Manhattan accounting firm, a beloved, bighearted communal activist who served as treasurer of the OU, on the board of directors of Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, and a staunch supporter of Yeshivat Shaalvim and other institutions — was on the flight too, returning from a one-day business trip to London together with his associate Jerry Weston.

The plane’s 243 passengers and 16 crew members were all blissfully unaware of the Samsonite suitcase in the forward hold, containing a Toshiba RT-SF16 radio cassette player fitted with a detonation device that would be activated automatically once the plane reached a certain altitude. (The terrorists assumed the bomb would be activated once the plane was over the Atlantic, in which case the aircraft, and all passengers, would have been plunged into the ocean depths.)

At 7:02 p.m., when the Clipper was at approximately 31,000 feet (about six miles into the atmosphere), an ear-splitting explosion punched a 50cm hole right through the left side of the fuselage. Within three seconds of the blast, the nose of the Clipper had sheered right off, a wing and engines had separated, and Pan Am flight 103 was plummeting out of the sky. For the next 46 seconds, as the passengers tumbled out of the plane from six miles up, many still strapped into their seats and instantly losing consciousness due to lack of oxygen, the dismembered aircraft twirled and plunged to the ground, landing in the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland. One section of the aircraft flattened several homes and created a 155-foot-long crater.

In all, 270 were killed — all 243 passengers and 16 crew members from the plane, and 11 civilians whose homes were incinerated on the spot, their bodies never retrieved.