Remembering Pan Am Flight 103: Vanessa St. Oegger-Menn

Vanessa St. Oegger-Menn, the Pan Am Flight 103 archivist and assistant university archivist at Syracuse University, talks about preserving the history of Pan Am Flight 103.

Video Transcript

The collections are used for teaching a lot, which is really important, especially now we've reached a point where I believe our freshmen this year are the last set of freshmen that we are going to have that were born before 9/11.

So for them, Pan Am 103 and the history of the disaster and just what the experience was like of something like that happening in 1988 is completely foreign. They are baffled by the fact that we didn't know right away who was on the plane, how many students were on the plane, that families learned that their loved one had died by seeing their names scroll on a television screen, that there wasn't that period of, you know, names can't be released until family members are notified. 

So we’re trying to do more and more with the collections to make sure that people don't forget, and that the fact that this really was, as we were talking about earlier, a watershed event. It was something that I think for a lot of folks introduced them to this concept of terrorism, and that it was something that could happen to someone just like you.

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