O
n the afternoon of Dec. 21, 1988, Syracuse University student Matthew Trento walked into New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, ready to make what he thought would be a routine connection between a Pan Am flight and a Piedmont plane bound for Syracuse.
It was his first time in the United States in months. After studying abroad in London that fall, he was anxious to see his family.
Trento had originally planned to leave for the U.S. a few hours later that day, on Pan Am Flight 103. But his mother, concerned about a potentially long layover in Kennedy, decided to switch him to an earlier flight, Pan Am Flight 101.
He didn’t think much of the change.
While he waited to board his next plane, though, parents of other SU students arrived at Kennedy, looking for their children. There were no reunions. As Christmas lights flickered in the Pan Am terminal, parents were greeted by two words, frozen beside Pan Am Flight 103’s listing on the arrivals board: “SEE AGENT.”
At 9:30 p.m., airline officials approached the parents, waiting in a lounge, and told them that their kids would not be coming home. They began to cry. Some prayed.
Trento should’ve been on that flight, too. The number “103” was still printed on his travel documents.
“I don’t think I really understood or comprehended the vastness of what happened,” Trento said, remembering, 31 years later, how he felt in the hours after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded midair.
Trento would soon learn that 270 people, including 35 students traveling back to the U.S. from SU’s abroad program, had just been killed in what would be America’s deadliest terrorist attack before 9/11. A luggage bomb, planted in the Pan Am Flight 103’s cargo hold by Libyan terrorists, destroyed the Boeing 747 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all passengers aboard the plane and 11 people on the ground.
As reporters approached Trento in the Kennedy terminal, he told them he knew that SU students, including some of his friends, had been on Flight 103. And he knew that if he hadn’t switched tickets, he would’ve been with them.
Seemingly insignificant decisions — and the ease in which airline tickets could be swapped or given away — spared several students that day. Trento’s mom switched his ticket in October to make sure he had an easy connection. Another student gave away her Flight 103 ticket at a party. One student was spared because of an argument with his father.
Over the last three decades, the students who were supposed to be on the plane, but weren’t, have lived in the shadow of the tragedy. Some have come to terms with the fact that they just got lucky. For others, survivor’s guilt lingers.
They took another flight. Thirty-five other students didn’t.
I
n the summer of 1988, Cheryl Lasse sat in her apartment in Syracuse, on the phone with a Pan Am ticketing agent, making plans to return to the U.S. after her semester abroad in London. She wanted to return to campus by Dec. 23, in time to see her friends before they went home for winter break, so she chose to fly Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 20.
“Twenty is a good round number,” Lasse remembered telling the agent over the phone. “I’m going to come home on the 20th.”
That decision saved Lasse’s life. She arrived in the U.S. on the last Pan Am Flight 103 before the disaster.
Lasse booked her flight independently, but other SU students got their tickets through a Syracuse-based travel agency that partnered with the university. Students could choose their return flights on Dec. 19, 20 or 21, or they could select an open-ended ticket option that allowed them to return to the U.S. whenever they wanted. Some students wanted to fly home early to be with their friends and family. Some wanted to travel around Europe after their final exams.
A travel agency sent this letter to students in summer 1988 to arrange travel home from their semester abroad. RICHARD PAUL MONETTI FAMILY PAPERS; SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESEARCH CENTER, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
Back at Kennedy, on Dec. 21, Trento didn’t know if his parents remembered which Pan Am flight he had switched to, or if they even knew whether he was alive.
In Syracuse, Trento’s sister found out about the plane crash first, after turning on the TV. News reports eventually identified the flight number, but Trento’s mother forgot if her son had been on Flight 101 or 103. She began making desperate calls to Pan Am and a travel agent, trying to get information about Trento’s itinerary.
At the same time, from the airport, Trento was able to call home. With the phone at his parent’s Ostrom Avenue house busy, he asked the operator to make an emergency break through the lines so he could reach his mother.
Yes, he was safe, he eventually told her.
A few blocks from Trento’s home, the phone lines at SU were also jammed.
Ron Cavanagh, then-SU’s vice president of undergraduate studies, pleaded with Pan Am officials to give him a list of students on the flight. The airline couldn’t confirm the manifest, Cavanagh said, but they released the names of students who they thought might be on Flight 103.
Dozens of parents contacted SU, unsure if their children were alive or dead. SU’s lawyers initially cautioned university administrators against calling families when so little was known. But later that night, Cavanagh began dialing phone numbers anyway.
His first call was to a mother in Chicago.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about the Pan Am flight from London to the United States, that your son was supposed to be on,” Cavanagh recalled telling her. “But …”
The mother interrupted him. “Oh, would you like to talk to him?” she asked. Her son was alive. He had already made it back to the U.S.
It would be days before Pan Am could officially confirm who was aboard Flight 103.
It was like your heart got ripped out
Cheryl Lasse, SU student who studied abroad in London in 1988Switching flights and trading tickets was easy in the pre-9/11 travel world of the 1980s. Today, it’s practically impossible to enter an airport terminal without a photo ID and matching ticket. For security reasons, airlines prohibit passengers from trading or giving their plane tickets to other people. Open-ended tickets no longer exist. But in 1988, students studying abroad could trade flights or give away tickets without problems.
Stacey Sweeney, an SU junior, switched to the earlier flight, 101, about three weeks before flying home. Mary Ann Bayer, an Ohio Wesleyan University student who studied in London in 1988 through SU’s abroad program, said she remembered one of her friends giving a Flight 103 ticket away at a party. Trento simply walked into the Pan Am office in London to pick up his new ticket.
Confusion over the Flight 103 manifest eventually spurred Congress to pass legislation requiring that airlines provide accurate passenger lists within hours of a disaster, among other things. But, still, airlines didn’t always follow the law. When a TWA plane crashed at Kennedy in 1996, the company took 12 hours to confirm the victims’ identities after first releasing conflicting statements.
“What’s it going to take?” M. Victoria Cummock, the wife of a Pan Am Flight 103 passenger, told The New York Times in 1996. “A plane getting blown out of the sky on American soil?”
B
efore he left for London, Steve LaPierre lost the most important argument he would ever have with his father. LaPierre, then a junior at SU, wanted to spend as much time abroad as he could. When his travel paperwork arrived at his home near Hartford, Connecticut, in summer 1988, he checked a box indicating that he would fly back to the U.S. on Dec. 21 — aboard Pan Am Flight 103.
“‘No, you need to come back earlier than that,’” LaPierre remembers his father telling him. “‘Your mom’s going to want you back for Christmas.’”
His father took the document, crossed out the 21st, over LaPierre’s arguments, and checked Dec. 20.
“Why did he choose that Tuesday when I wanted to go on Wednesday? I don’t know,” LaPierre said. “I’m glad, but I also feel guilty.”
His guilt is shared by some of the other students who returned home from London. They tear up when thinking about their friends. It’s difficult for them to attend Pan Am Flight 103 memorial ceremonies, like the ones at SU this week, because they can’t stand to see the faces of the parents who lost children.
This feeling, known as survivor’s guilt, is shared by many who survive or narrowly avoid tragedy. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies survivor’s guilt as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. People who ran late to work on 9/11 have survivor’s guilt. So do high schoolers who survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. The soldiers who returned from Iraq, too.
Why did he choose that Tuesday when I wanted to go on Wednesday? I don’t know. I’m glad, but I also feel guilty.
Steve LaPierre, SU student who studied abroad in London in 1988Lasse, the student who left London on Dec. 20, said she grapples with survivor’s guilt. Her sorority sisters in Alpha Chi Omega surrounded a TV the afternoon Pan Am 103 went down, yet to fully understand the severity of the disaster. It wasn’t until the next morning, as Lasse pored over a newspaper at Acropolis Pizza, that she came to the full realization that some of her friends were dead.
There were students like Kenneth John Bissett, a Cornell University junior studying in London through the SU program, who helped Lasse carry her luggage to the bus stop before she left for Heathrow Airport. And Scott Cory and Steve Berrell, SU juniors who Lasse worked with on class projects. Berrell, incoming social chair of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, at the time, planned spring Greek events with Lasse, who was the incoming social chair of her sorority.
Lasse collapsed in Acropolis after she read their names.
“It was like your heart got ripped out,” Lasse said. “These are your friends. These are the people you just experienced so many amazing things with and there’s no way to explain that feeling. It starts with the horror of it and then it kicks right into survivor’s guilt.”
LaPierre said it’s difficult for him to think about how he never got to say a proper goodbye to the friends he made in London.
He tries to celebrate those memories by talking to Remembrance Scholars — 35 SU seniors chosen every year — to help them learn about Pan Am Flight 103 and the students who died in 1988. LaPierre’s attended about 15 of the annual ceremonies at the Pan Am Flight 103 Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. And he’s traveled to SU twice for Remembrance Week, which educates students about the bombing and its impact.
It’s the memorials that are the hardest to attend, LaPierre said. The parents at them could have convinced their kids to pick Pan Am Flight 103 just as easily as his dad convinced him to pick an earlier flight.
“As much as you want to remember your friends, boy, it’s hard to look at your friends’ parents,” he said. “You want to talk about survivor’s guilt? That’s when it really manifests itself.”
O
n Dec. 21, Trento boarded the Piedmont flight to Syracuse. So too did reporters bound for the university, covering what was quickly becoming an international news story. When Trento sat down, he noticed a child’s booster seat next to his. A reporter, probably realizing that Trento was an SU student, kept trying to take the spot.
“You can’t sit there,” Trento remembers the flight attendant telling the reporter. “Go back to your seat.”
The journalist argued with the flight attendant, Trento said, almost to the point of an “altercation.” But the reporter eventually conceded. Trento flew home alone.
People make random, insignificant decisions every day. Most of them are inconsequential. In 1988, picking a return flight home after studying abroad — or switching flights — was supposed to be one of those inconsequential decisions.
None of the 35 students knew that, if they chose the 6 p.m. flight on Dec. 21, they wouldn’t make it home.
None of the hundreds of other students who studied abroad that fall knew that one choice ensured their safe return across the Atlantic.
“I’ll never not have that as a part of my life,” Trento said recently.
Flying back to Syracuse, Trento didn’t know that his photo would be on the front page of the next day’s Syracuse Post-Standard, among the headlines: “Fiery jumbo jet crash kills 38 SU students in Scotland” and “Grim classmates wait for news of friends.” Because of the decision to switch his flight, Trento’s was the story of the lucky SU student who made it back.
His name wasn’t on The Post-Standard’s list of the dead.
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