Reliving the nightmare

THE LE Aisling was one of the first ships to arrive at the scene of the felled Air India Flight 182, around four hours after air traffic controllers at Shannon lost contact with the Boeing 747 jet airliner.

It was the morning of June 23, 1985, and a bomb planted in the luggage compartment of the plane had just exploded at 31,000ft, killing all 329 people on board.

The navy crew stumbled on a scene of hellish proportions, broken bodies floating amid the wreckage of the New Delhi-bound plane. Personnel from the ship spent the next 10 hours fishing bodies out of the sea some 100 miles west-southwest of the Kerry coast before ferrying them back to land in west Cork.