Book review
'Terror' looks inside doomed Pan Am 103
By Carleste Hughes
Associated Press
On Dec. 21, 1988, a bomb inside a suitcase exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 en route from London to New York.
The plane, flying at 31,000 feet, split open, hurling its 270 passengers into the below-zero air over Lockerbie, Scotland. By all accounts, most of them were still alive and were left to gasp oxygen-thin air.
"The Price of Terror"
By Allan Gerson and Jerry Adler
HarperCollins, $25.95
The disaster killed more Americans in peacetime than any incident before last Sept. 11.
"Most of the autopsies showed fat embolisms in their lungs, evidence of a traumatic injury that was not immediately fatal," wrote Allan Gerson and Jerry Adler in Chapter 1 of their book, "The Price of Terror."
"Were they conscious as they fell? Did they suffer all the way down, did they scream?"
Such gruesome — but fascinating — questions open the book, not simply for sensational or theoretical interest, but to draw attention to a very relevant realm of legal debate.
The victims' suffering was a "tort, a legal wrong for which compensation is due, and its precise degree and nature made a great deal of difference," the authors wrote.
Victims' families were involved in two types of lawsuits:
• A willful-misconduct suit was filed, charging Pan Am with gross negligence for allowing baggage carrying a bomb onto the plane at Frankfurt, West Germany, its point of origin.
• The other suit, engineered by Gerson, was a carefully choreographed dance through the rules of international diplomacy to sue the government of Libya for terrorism. The case broke intellectual ground but was difficult to enforce. The U.S. government wanted Libya's leader, Moammar Gadhafi, to be put in a corner, not in a coffin, fearing his successor would be even more radical.
What helped the families' case against Pan Am was that the Federal Aviation Administration inspected the Frankfurt airport several months before the attack and found its security to be atrocious. Most shocking is the description of Pan Am's refusal to match checked luggage against boarded passengers. The airline insisted the practice was expensive and unnecessary.
Only after years of wrangling did the insurance companies and Pan Am pay up. But families were not compensated equally. Relatives of first-class passengers received more because their estimated losses were greater.
After the book's fascinating first chapter, its focus blurs, and too often the book reads like a legal text.
