No, this is a different person. It's mentioned in the linked article. That person died years ago.

David White who played Larry Tate on "Bewitched" lost his son on the flight. He died 2 years later, many say from grief over the loss of his son.

^^^ I had to look-up the Larry Tate part on youtube.
He fit/acted that part great.

Reagan sent some F-111's out of London to say hello to Khadaffi. (sp?) They managed to get his son, but missed him. Khadaffi decided to play nice after that...

that's half assed ..
last thing I would have an interest in is for K to play nice..

Libya should have been a smoldering crater..

Rika

Fairly certain that was in 1986 in retaliation for the West Berlin Disco bombing. The bombers were from RAF Lakenheath in East Anglia about 70 miles NE from London.

You're right...F-111 a hell of a fighter/bomber back in it's day.

Reagan's address to the nation on the attack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjYMVSA6xM8&feature=emb_title

A buddy of mine was a F-111 mechanic. He told me that although they had capability to go supersonic that if they did so a full engine rebuild was required.

Must have hated it when they went Mach speeds then. I have a buddy since childhood who flew 'em...a pilot. Perhaps they knew each other? Jim never mentioned the rebuild thing to me. Probably classified at the time.

Some years back Jim & I went to my local gun club range. Rangemaster was a former USAF Sgt., mechanic on B-52's. I found it interesting, that although they had both been out of the USAF for quite some time, they quickly reverted to enlisted and officer...

From what I recall that operation on Libya was launched from a Royal Air Base in the UK. The French guvmint wouldn't allow us to cross their airspace for the mission, so it ended up being a very long round trip for the F-111 crews.

God bless France, but that wasn't necessarily a high point in US/Franco military cooperation :mad:

That is a fairly common occurrence over there. They want us to do the heavy lifting but hand out a bunch of sissy restrictions like:

A. don't use our airspace,
B. don't send your stuff through our country via rail,
C. you can't use our ports,

and my personal favorite D... If your stuff went thru certain countries that didn't quite jive with the destination country OR sailed on a vessel flagged under certain countries then host nations flip out.

But the country side is beautiful ;)

Good friend of mine was the Captain on PanAm 103 that day... but luckily for him he was flying the B-727 from Frankfurt to London, where the pax and baggage were then loaded onto a B-747 for the flight to JFK.

He was a heavy smoker so had the flight engineer bring the cabin pressure down low to keep more air-flow coming through the cockpit so he could smoke. To this day he feels that the bomb should have gone off in his airplane but that this action saved his life and the lives of everyone on the airplane.

They landed and headed to the hotel. About 2 am his phone rang and it was the European President of PanAm. "Can you fly immediately?" He ran to the airport and got into the same -727 and took everyone possible up to the crash site...

I flew -103 several times coming and going. Was based in Berlin at that time and it was a good quick way to get back to CONUS. A part of me died when PanAm went down...

Wow, that's an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.

Pretty incredible how an event like that is connected in different ways to people on this board.

I remember watching that speech live. Reagan understood how to deal with state sponsored terrorism.

Kind of funny how that works...elect a liberal, the scum crawls out from under their rocks again.

Thanks for sharing and welcome back!

An interview with William Barr on the evening news tonight.
U.S. Attorney General at the time of the bombing.

Thanks for posting... That brought back some memories. I was serving at the time of the raid.

One of Ronald Reagan's great speeches that's still relevant today.

I don't want to PARF this thread so I'll shut up now