Shortly after leaving London Heathrow airport in December 1988, Pan Am flight 103 exploded above Lockerbie , Scotland killing 270 people. Investigators soon discovered that a bomb in the forward cargo compartment had taken down the plane.

Rescuers have to look to the past to solve the riddle of Flight 611, a China Airlines 747 that disappeared 20 minutes after taking off.

On September 8, 1989, Partnair Flight 394, a charter from Oslo to Hamburg, suddenly begins to dive from 22 thousand feet. The aging propeller plane eventually crashes into the sea, killing all 55 people on board.

Near the close of the Vietnam War, the United States launched Operation Babylift, a mass evacuation of children from war torn Vietnam. On April 4th 1975, the first Babylift flight ended in tragedy when a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy carrying 314 passengers crashed during an emergency landing at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam killing 138.

On 6 August 2005, Tuninter Flight 1153 runs out of fuel and ditches into the Mediterranean Sea, killing 16 people. It ran out of fuel because a fuel gauge for a different type of aircraft had been installed, misleading the crew about how much fuel was on board.

On January 1st 2007, a Boeing 737-400 crashed into the Makassar Strait near Polewali in Sulawesi. The subsequent investigation raised deep concerns about the safety record of the Indonesian airline industry.

On 31 October 1994, American Eagle Flight 4184 falls out of the sky, killing all 68 people on board. The crash was caused by ice developing on the wing in a manner that the on-board deicing system could not remove.