In both cases these aircraft losses occurred in the dead of winter, the one some ten days prior New Year and the other not quite that long afterward and I recall working and living in London at the time and even now, where I was when I heard of each.
I must have been working late and likely at WANG computer at the time off Baker Street, in a traffic-jam down Mayfair, when news came through of the loss of flight 103 operated by PanAm: Netflix taking you back there, half a lifetime ago. The one connection I have is having worked as a captain in Libya, where it is thought that the plan to bring down the airliner originated. It was undoubtedly the more riskier of contracts, my briefing on the inaugural flight out of Tripoli interrupted by news from the cabin that a man waving a gun had come to see off a friend... I let him.
Kegworth I knew of more directly, having got that command on the same type and at the same time not that long afterward. The young man in dispatch at Heathrow in the old Queens Building I liked for his humour. One day passing me the papers he let know that he'd woken with a dead arm and therefore decided to masturbate for it felt, as he told me by way of pre-flight briefing, that it felt like someone else was doing it for him. And for aircrew, it's exactly what you wanted to hear at 05:30 a.m.
The aircraft broke into three pieces on the motorway embankment, the rearmost inverted and from which he emerged to wander dazed down the carriageway in the aftermath. The airline's proprietor offered him a job for life, or at least until budget airlines meant the carrier was absorbed into British Airways; whereupon we would meet again at a book fair in Islington.
The captain was apparently known as "Hunt the Cunt" and the fact the crew did not approach the flight-deck to divulge conflicting information as to whether the right of left engine had failed was attributed at least in part to this. That said there are two things I would offer in his defence.
Firstly few airline captains are particularly liked by the crew. Generally they're either good at flying, or else liked by everyone, but rarely combine the two... although a precious few managed did this. On receipt of a command at this legacy aircraft ~ ad against $10,000 dollars in the right pocket elsewhere in the world ~ I would be told "Congratulations Hilton, you just became the least popular person on the aircraft."
A role I feel that I fulfilled admirably. Secondly however, this itself an object lesson, there was no clear way of telling which was right and which left: the senior having to guess whether that meant facing backwards from the forward galley or else the same way as the passengers ~ so maybe what the flight-crew was saying over the PA was correct?
Thus Flights 103 and 092 (the shuttle I operated countless times to Belfast) would be separated by barely a fortnight. And the only connection I have now, these many years later, is the fact that on occasion I drive a truck past the village of Lockerbie, which is practically alongside the principal route between London and Glasgow.
The only detail I can fault the series on is the fact the heavier parts of the aircraft hit the ground first, and not shortly after. At the time the primary radars were analogue and not digital, so controllers knew the aircraft had broken up because its single radar return fragmented into several more 'blobs' on the screen.
