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Less than two minutes later, the fire storm began over Lockerbie. Said George Gilston, who was walking his dog when the jet fell out of the sky: "I heard a noise like thunder, and then I saw the outline of a plane dropping, nose down, straight into the ground." Peter O'Brien was driving by on the A74 highway. "The whole sky lit up as though it was daylight," he said later. "The car behind me was engulfed in flames, and houses were suddenly on fire, as if petrol had been sprayed over them. It was an incredible inferno." Recalled truck driver John McGuinness: "I'm sure the plane was on fire before it crashed. It looked like a red sunset."
Sputtering burning fuel, a large chunk of the fuselage struck a hill outside Lockerbie, then careened into a gas station and two rows of houses, gouging a 20-ft.-wide crater in a roadway. In the center of town, an aircraft engine lay embedded in the street. Sixty bodies were later recovered from a nearby golf course and taken to the town hall, which had been turned into a makeshift mortuary. One body was found on a back porch, another entangled in the branches of a tree. Three miles away, the plane's blue-and-white cockpit, containing the bodies of the flight crew, was perched, almost intact, on a hillside, severed from the rest of the fuselage as if by a giant karate chop.
On the other side of the Atlantic, some of the relatives and friends of Flight 103's victims arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport unaware of the tragedy. Gazing up at the electronic arrivals board, they read an ominous message next to the flight number: SEE AGT. When they found a Pan Am agent, they were led into a lounge and told the news. One grief-stricken woman, shouting "My baby! My baby!," threw herself on the ground.
At first, investigators believed the disaster might have been caused by massive structural failure. Though Boeing 747s are among the sturdiest passenger planes in the world, a Japan Air Lines 747 crashed on a domestic flight in 1985 after a rear bulkhead ruptured as the result of a faulty repair job, killing 520 of the 524 aboard. But one important difference between the Japan Air Lines crash and the Pan Am tragedy was that the pilot of the Japanese plane was able to talk to ground control for half an hour as he tried unsuccessfully to land his mortally wounded craft. In last week's disaster, there was only silence. A preliminary inquiry showed that the plane's various electronic systems had gone dead simultaneously.
Pan Am's Clipper Maid of the Seas, the 15th 747 to come off the Boeing production line, had been in service since February 1970 and had made some 16,500 takeoffs and landings. Despite the plane's age and length of service, however, most aviation experts would not rate the aircraft as particularly worn or fatigued. Moreover, the airline pointed out that the plane had been fully refitted 15 months ago and was checked and serviced in San Francisco only a week before the crash.