Lockerbie, why not miss the Sky series on the attack on Pan Am Flight 103
Lockerbie – Attack on Pan Am Flight 103, a TV series based on the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, which talks about the plane attack which on 21 December 1988 cost the lives of 270 people, including eleven residents of the Scottish town of Lockerbie where the various pieces of the plane crashed to the ground.
A dramatic TV series in the most complete sense of the term, but also an opportunity to turn the spotlight back on a story that, 36 years later, still has too many gray areas.
The true story of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which crashed into Lockerbie
The Lockerbie Plot – Pan Am Flight Bombing
The book on which the series is based was written by Dr. Jim Swire, father of Flora, one of the 243 passengers who died along with the 16 crew members.
The series begins by showing him waiting to meet the one who is still the only one convicted of the massacre, but then we go back to those days at the end of 1988.
Flora decided to spend the Christmas holidays with her American boyfriend, and despite the period she found a plane ticket quite easily.
So her sister Kathy accompanies her from the family home in Berkshire, where Jim works as a doctor, to London’s Heathrow airport.
That will be the last time that Jim, his wife Jane and their son William will see Flora, because a few minutes after take-off a bomb explodes the plane which will never reach New York.
The wreckage that fell to the ground swept away several houses and killed eleven people in Lockerbie, the Scottish town whose name will forever be linked to this attack.
It won’t take investigators long to understand that the plane exploded due to a bomb made with a plastic explosive placed in a cassette player, and it won’t take them long to identify the culprit as the Libyan Abd el-Basset Ali al-Megrahi, but Jim Swire is not content to witness the slow progress of investigations, extradition requests and trials.
From the day of his daughter’s death, and for three decades, James Swire carries out his investigation and his questions to understand how it was possible to introduce that bomb on the plane despite the alarms of the previous days. Jim wants to find out the whole truth, but (spoiler) even today there is no certain and incontrovertible truth about what happened that December evening.
A “biased” series not to be missed
This series is not a documentary on the Pan Am 103 attack. That is, it is not the (as far as possible) cold story of what happened, of what emerged from the investigations and of what the trials established.
It is a biased story, it is the point of view of the one who was chosen as spokesperson for the families of the English victims of the disaster, in which two Italians also lost their lives.
Colin Firth masterfully plays Jim Swire, his desperation that becomes obstinate determination, his choices to provoke public opinion and highlight the limits of institutions, starting with Margaret Thatcher’s British government which perhaps he could have done more to protect the safety of passengers.
The protagonist of this series is also a controversial man, who paradoxically had to face (as can be seen from the trailer below) hostility and threats and various dangers on his journey to understand who killed his daughter and why.
Libya, Iran, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: even today there are no certain answers to Dr. Swire’s questions, and a new trial should begin this year, who knows if Swire will finally be able to learn the truth.
Rating: 7.9