At 6:25 pm on December 21, 1988, Pan Am's Clipper Maid of the Seas departed Heathrow Airport in London for New York City's JFK Airport. One half hour later at 7:02 pm London time, as the Boeing 747 leveled off at 31,000 feet just north of the England-Scotland border, an explosion blew a basketball-sized hole in the fuselage. The plane broke apart and plummeted to earth. All 259 passengers of Flight 103 and 11 residents of the town of Lockerbie, Scotland were killed. Among those killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103 were 35 students returning home from a semester of study abroad through Syracuse University.

Before long the world would know that it was not a mechanical failure or foul weather that brought down the plane, but a terrorist bomb: a Semtex plastic explosive planted in a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder packed inside a Samsonite suitcase stowed in the plane's forward cargo hold. Only one man would ever be convicted for committing this terrorist act. Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi and fellow Libyan Intelligence agent Lamin Khalifah Fhimah were indicted by the United States in 1991, formally charged by the Scottish authorities in 1999 and tried by an international court at Camp Zeist, Netherlands beginning in 2000. Al-Megrahi's conviction was handed down in 2001. Fhimah was found not guilty. Al-Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds in 2009, after a terminal cancer diagnosis gave him three months to live. He died three years later. The investigation of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 remains open.