Sometimes memory is a bitch

[julesjones]

Saw the footage of the plane down in the Hudson this evening, was well impressed with the pilots' skill at putting a dead bird down that accurately. It never even occurred to me that it was anything other than an accident, because... well, I know what terrorist attacks on a long-haul aircraft tend to look like. Then someone mentioned that some of the news channels in the US were busy "reassuring" people that it probably wasn't a terrorist attack. And for a moment I was back in a car on the road to the ferry port at Stranraer, along with a lot of other people on their way to see family for Christmas, with a far better view than they really wanted of the search for pieces of Pan Am Flight 103. It's been twenty years, I knew nobody with any connection with that flight, and it still gets to me sometimes.

Comments

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

The news services have been assuring us here about everything not being a terrorist act since about 9/12/01, even the mudslides, snowstorms and wildfires (which may be actually human caused, and may be deliberate).

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Just driving up the road past Lockerbie shortly afterwards was bad enough.

And then to get reports (quite a long time) afterwards that they thought one of the passengers had been alive when they hit the ground and had clawed at the grass while lying there dying. How can someone fall from that altitude after explosive decompression and still do that?

The survival of the passengers from the Hudon ditching is a minor miracle and a credit to the skill of the pilot and the training of the crew - plus the speed of the rescue operation, of course. It's not all that long ago that a plane came down in the Potomac with less good results.