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.

Switching 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.

Lasse, 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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