Lockerbie 25th anniversary: Ingrid Smith, from North Hykeham, was among the victims

The Lockerbie tragedy happened 25 years ago today when a Pan Am jet with 243 passengers on board, including Ingrid Smith, 30, who had left her parents’ home in North Hykeham hours earlier, crashed on to the Scottish town.

Initial reports indicated it had crashed in the centre of the town on December 21, 1988 and burst into a 300-foot fireball.

The Boeing 747 had left Heathrow at 6pm GMT bound for New York’s JFK airport. Shortly after 7pm the flight disappeared from radar screens at Prestwick Air Traffic Control Centre.

The following day the headlines in the Echo said the grim search for victims of Britain’s worst air disaster continued and suspicions were growing by the hour that the cause may have been a terrorist bomb.

Few areas of Lockerbie escaped devastation when the jumbo jet crashed more than 30,000ft and ripped through shops and houses.

All 243 passengers and 16 crew were killed, along with 11 people on the ground.

There were also harrowing scenes at JFK airport where waiting family and friends heard the news.

Devastated county couple Hilda and Dennis Ledgard wept as they explained that their daughter had taken the flight.

A cruel twist of fate led the pilot’s wife, Ingrid Smith, to snatch a last minute seat in the very plane her husband had previously piloted.

Hours earlier, the 30-year old, whose husband Bruce had flown jumbo jets all over the world, had left her parents’ home in North Hykeham in the hope of getting to America.

Pan-Am pilot Bruce Smith was on a flight from Bermuda at the time of the Lockerbie crash.

The debris was scattered across 845 square miles and the impact registered 1.6 on the Richter scale.

The subsequent police investigation was the biggest ever mounted in Scotland.

Two men accused of being Libyan intelligence agents were eventually charged with planting the bomb but it took several years to bring them to justice.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was jailed for life in January 2001 at a trial at camp Zeist in Holland. His alleged accomplice, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was found not guilty.

Al-Megrahi was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008 and was released on compassionate grounds and died in Tripoli, Libya, last year.