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Their Darkest Day: The Tragedy of Pan Am 103 and It's Legacy of Hope
An account of the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, chronicles the stories of the people who perished in the disaster, describing the result of their tragic death on their families.
233 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 20, 2016
Once again, planes are falling from the sky.
The loss of Pan Am 103 occurred on December 21, 1988. But it doesn’t seem so far away anymore, because it’s happening again.
Nothing is more terrifying to me than a plane crash. Not in a debilitating way. I fly often and also understand basic probabilities. (Choosing the loaded nachos for lunch is far likelier to kill me than a terrorist). But it affects me existentially. Of all the ways I don’t want to die, on an airplane tops the list. I imagine the sickening lurch in my stomach, the way you feel on a rollercoaster; but instead of that feeling lasting a few seconds, it just goes on and on. I imagine the absolute lack of control, the inability to do anything to alter your fate. I imagine the cosmic joke it must be, to look around you as you are dying to see only the faces of people who have been annoying the hell out of you for the past several hours.
Perhaps it’s this dread that propels me to read so much about airline disasters. Articles, books, CVR-recordings. I read it all. I’m not a fatalist; I think, instead, that it is a way of confronting mortality.
(On a personal note: an uncle and two cousins of mine died in a small plane crash returning from the Augusta National Golf Tournament. It merited a 15 second spot on CNN, as well as the requisite NTSB report – which I read. I say this to assure you I’m not insensitive to the reality that my fascination is not with an abstract concept, but a human tragedy).
When I think about airline disasters, about the horror and the cost, I think about Pan Am 103. It was four days before Christmas and 259 passengers and crew were cruising at 31,000 feet. At approximately 7:02 p.m., a Semtex bomb hidden in a cassette player exploded inside the luggage container. Within seconds, the small hole blown into the fuselage grew exponentially, and huge sections of the plane tore away. The cockpit and forward section of the fuselage detached, “deflecting up and to the right.” This turned the remainder of the fuselage into:
Lives and luggage and metal fell through the winter night and slammed into Lockerbie, killing a further 11 people. Passengers likely lost consciousness in the first moments after the explosion, though some regained it during their passage into oxygen-rich air. There was a report of at least one passenger found on the ground who still had a pulse.
The loss of PA 103 is the kind of story that needs no embellishment, and Matthew Cox and Tom Foster do a good job in Their Darkest Day of letting the facts speak for themselves. They write in a dry, reportorial style that does nothing to diminish the inherent power in this awful event. In a methodical manner, they recount the doomed flight of the Clipper Maid of the Seas, introducing us to several of the passengers who would shortly lose their lives. (35 of the passengers were students from Syracuse University).
Post-disaster, the authors take two different narrative tracks. They follow the criminal investigation, a massive undertaking that built a case using literal scraps of evidence. Eventually, blame would fall on agents of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The authors also devote significant time to the victims’ families, including Georgia Nucci, who lost her only son Christopher just a year after the sudden death of her only daughter.
The trouble with Their Darkest Day is that it was published in 1992.
Obviously, this is not a substantive critique. It is not the fault of the authors for not knowing they’d have to wait 20 more years for something resembling a resolution. (Relative resolution, of course).
Still, the book’s publication date ensures that it cannot come close to covering this story’s innumerable twists and turns. Their Darkest Day isn’t able to cover the criminal indictments handed down on two Libyan agents; or the arrest and conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi; or al-Megrahi’s compassionate release from a Scottish prison when he was dying from cancer; or how he returned home to a hero’s welcome in 2009 and then stubbornly refused to die until 2012. The book cannot cover the epic tale of the PA 103 Families, who demonstrated the incredible influence a committed bloc of grieving relatives can wield. They fought to change the rules, from the way that airline luggage is handled to the ability to sue a foreign country. (Those interested in the civil lawsuits following PA 103 should read The Price of Terror, written by one of the attorneys). Similarly, the book is not able to follow the families as they fracture and coalesce into different groups with different agendas. Their Darkest Day ends long before Gaddafi finally offered to pay nearly $3 billion in compensation to the PA 103 families, an offer made around the time that Gaddafi joined – irony of ironies – the War on Terror. Finally, the book ends 19 years before Gaddafi’s bloody face ended up on the cover of the British tabloid The Sun, beneath the banner headline: “THAT’S FOR LOCKERBIE”.
That’s only part of the problem, though.
A book like this can never really be satisfying because words are not sufficient. The authors search for a measure of catharsis – the subtitle is “The Tragedy of Pan Am 103 and Its Legacy of Hope” – but that kind of silver lining is a weak sentiment. I didn't find any hope on these pages, just people dealing courageously with the senselessness of this shitty world.
In the end, we don’t need a book to tell us all we really need to know. That on December 21, 1988, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103. The aircraft broke apart, spilling 259 men, women, and children into the winter air. They fell through cold and dark and 31,000 feet. They fell for two minutes and they fell for eternity and they fell to a place that exists outside of time, where they still remain, frozen in their last thoughts of family, and Christmas, and home. They have achieved a terrible kind of timelessness, like the prostrated figures of doomed Pompeii. We can learn about their lives, but that pales to what they have already taught us.
That we are all fragile.
The loss of Pan Am 103 occurred on December 21, 1988. But it doesn’t seem so far away anymore, because it’s happening again.
Nothing is more terrifying to me than a plane crash. Not in a debilitating way. I fly often and also understand basic probabilities. (Choosing the loaded nachos for lunch is far likelier to kill me than a terrorist). But it affects me existentially. Of all the ways I don’t want to die, on an airplane tops the list. I imagine the sickening lurch in my stomach, the way you feel on a rollercoaster; but instead of that feeling lasting a few seconds, it just goes on and on. I imagine the absolute lack of control, the inability to do anything to alter your fate. I imagine the cosmic joke it must be, to look around you as you are dying to see only the faces of people who have been annoying the hell out of you for the past several hours.
Perhaps it’s this dread that propels me to read so much about airline disasters. Articles, books, CVR-recordings. I read it all. I’m not a fatalist; I think, instead, that it is a way of confronting mortality.
(On a personal note: an uncle and two cousins of mine died in a small plane crash returning from the Augusta National Golf Tournament. It merited a 15 second spot on CNN, as well as the requisite NTSB report – which I read. I say this to assure you I’m not insensitive to the reality that my fascination is not with an abstract concept, but a human tragedy).
When I think about airline disasters, about the horror and the cost, I think about Pan Am 103. It was four days before Christmas and 259 passengers and crew were cruising at 31,000 feet. At approximately 7:02 p.m., a Semtex bomb hidden in a cassette player exploded inside the luggage container. Within seconds, the small hole blown into the fuselage grew exponentially, and huge sections of the plane tore away. The cockpit and forward section of the fuselage detached, “deflecting up and to the right.” This turned the remainder of the fuselage into:
[A]n open cylinder, hopelessly nonaerodynamic. Tornado-force winds tore down the aisles, stripping clothing off the backs of passengers and flight attendants, turning drink carts into lethal projectiles and filling the air with sharp, deadly pieces of shrapnel. The wind and the rending of metal created a tremendous roar. Some passengers were thrown to the rear. Others, tossed out into the deadly night, joined luggage and other pieces of the plane to form a ghostly caravan that swept through the moonlit troposphere at 499 mph… In the instant the sealed fuselage broke apart, the air pressure inside the cabin plummeted to equal that of the atmosphere outside. Suddenly subjected to the lower air pressure, gases inside passengers’ bodies expanded to four times their normal volume. Most of the passengers found themselves fighting for breath. Expanding gases caused their lungs to swell and then collapse…
Lives and luggage and metal fell through the winter night and slammed into Lockerbie, killing a further 11 people. Passengers likely lost consciousness in the first moments after the explosion, though some regained it during their passage into oxygen-rich air. There was a report of at least one passenger found on the ground who still had a pulse.
The loss of PA 103 is the kind of story that needs no embellishment, and Matthew Cox and Tom Foster do a good job in Their Darkest Day of letting the facts speak for themselves. They write in a dry, reportorial style that does nothing to diminish the inherent power in this awful event. In a methodical manner, they recount the doomed flight of the Clipper Maid of the Seas, introducing us to several of the passengers who would shortly lose their lives. (35 of the passengers were students from Syracuse University).
Post-disaster, the authors take two different narrative tracks. They follow the criminal investigation, a massive undertaking that built a case using literal scraps of evidence. Eventually, blame would fall on agents of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The authors also devote significant time to the victims’ families, including Georgia Nucci, who lost her only son Christopher just a year after the sudden death of her only daughter.
The trouble with Their Darkest Day is that it was published in 1992.
Obviously, this is not a substantive critique. It is not the fault of the authors for not knowing they’d have to wait 20 more years for something resembling a resolution. (Relative resolution, of course).
Still, the book’s publication date ensures that it cannot come close to covering this story’s innumerable twists and turns. Their Darkest Day isn’t able to cover the criminal indictments handed down on two Libyan agents; or the arrest and conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi; or al-Megrahi’s compassionate release from a Scottish prison when he was dying from cancer; or how he returned home to a hero’s welcome in 2009 and then stubbornly refused to die until 2012. The book cannot cover the epic tale of the PA 103 Families, who demonstrated the incredible influence a committed bloc of grieving relatives can wield. They fought to change the rules, from the way that airline luggage is handled to the ability to sue a foreign country. (Those interested in the civil lawsuits following PA 103 should read The Price of Terror, written by one of the attorneys). Similarly, the book is not able to follow the families as they fracture and coalesce into different groups with different agendas. Their Darkest Day ends long before Gaddafi finally offered to pay nearly $3 billion in compensation to the PA 103 families, an offer made around the time that Gaddafi joined – irony of ironies – the War on Terror. Finally, the book ends 19 years before Gaddafi’s bloody face ended up on the cover of the British tabloid The Sun, beneath the banner headline: “THAT’S FOR LOCKERBIE”.
That’s only part of the problem, though.
A book like this can never really be satisfying because words are not sufficient. The authors search for a measure of catharsis – the subtitle is “The Tragedy of Pan Am 103 and Its Legacy of Hope” – but that kind of silver lining is a weak sentiment. I didn't find any hope on these pages, just people dealing courageously with the senselessness of this shitty world.
In the end, we don’t need a book to tell us all we really need to know. That on December 21, 1988, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103. The aircraft broke apart, spilling 259 men, women, and children into the winter air. They fell through cold and dark and 31,000 feet. They fell for two minutes and they fell for eternity and they fell to a place that exists outside of time, where they still remain, frozen in their last thoughts of family, and Christmas, and home. They have achieved a terrible kind of timelessness, like the prostrated figures of doomed Pompeii. We can learn about their lives, but that pales to what they have already taught us.
That we are all fragile.
May 13, 2025
I tore through this one. Pan Am flight 103, which crashed on December 21, 1988, was a transatlantic flight that included a lot of college students returning home to the US for the holidays when it crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland after a bomb detonated in the aircraft. Everyone onboard was killed and there were fatalities on the ground as well. This book was written just a few years after the crash, at which point two Libyans were charged with the crime. Subsequently, one was acquitted and one convicted, with the latter being released on compassionate leave due to a cancer diagnosis which killed him shortly thereafter. Even more recently, another Libyan National was arrested and charged with the bombing and is awaiting trial. So needless to say this book could use some updating in that regard. The humanity aspect when it comes to covering the victims of this attack is spot on.
September 17, 2023
3.5 stars
I read an essay about the brother of one of the Pan Am 103 victims and that prompted me to learn more. This was the only book I could find in our library system.
It was published in 1992 so it feels immediate but also dated. I learned a lot I didn't know and I'm glad I read it. My biggest issue is that there were 270 people killed and most of them are mentioned only once, in the list of people killed. I kind of feel like it would have been ideal to have either a photo of everyone or more of a description in the list.
I'm also sorry to say that I feel like another terrorist act like this could happen tomorrow.
I read an essay about the brother of one of the Pan Am 103 victims and that prompted me to learn more. This was the only book I could find in our library system.
It was published in 1992 so it feels immediate but also dated. I learned a lot I didn't know and I'm glad I read it. My biggest issue is that there were 270 people killed and most of them are mentioned only once, in the list of people killed. I kind of feel like it would have been ideal to have either a photo of everyone or more of a description in the list.
I'm also sorry to say that I feel like another terrorist act like this could happen tomorrow.
January 24, 2024
The authors detail the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, interviewing many relatives of the innocent victims both on the airplane and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.
They also describe the meticulous search for the bomb makers and killers, who managed to place a suitcase on the connecting flight in Germany. Through carelessness and ineptness, German police allowed the bomb makers to go free and didn’t warn the public of hints of terrorism that they’d received in advance of the tragedy.
The authors also show how relatives of the victims spent months and years lobbying the US government to tighten security at airports, eventually managing to get a bill passed.
They also describe the meticulous search for the bomb makers and killers, who managed to place a suitcase on the connecting flight in Germany. Through carelessness and ineptness, German police allowed the bomb makers to go free and didn’t warn the public of hints of terrorism that they’d received in advance of the tragedy.
The authors also show how relatives of the victims spent months and years lobbying the US government to tighten security at airports, eventually managing to get a bill passed.
April 4, 2019
A chilling account of the tragedy at Lockerbie Scotland in 1988, including the events leading up to it, and the aftermath. The aftermath focuses on the efforts of the victims' families to improve air travel security. This book was written in 1992, only 3 years after the tragedy. While the families succeeded in getting airline security looked at & somewhat improved, knowing now of the 9/11/2001 terriorism, the "improvements" weren't enough. A very good book written my reporters who were on the story withing minutes of the crash.
January 19, 2016
A very sad and haunting story. Well written book.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews