Pan Am Flight 1-10

Thirty people died when the Clipper Empress of the Skies struck a stone fence short of Shannon runway in April 1948, but one man walked away burned and dazed while his wife searched for him beside the flames. The grand world-circling plane had carried diplomats and industrialists from San Francisco across oceans, yet a failing instrument light and a broken approach brought it into Clare soil. Their names still rest together in Drumcliff, remembered less as statistics than as lives interrupted at the edge of a runway.