An hour earlier 259 people had fallen six miles from the night sky after a terrorist bomb detonated onboard a Pan Am airliner heading from London to New York.

David 'Heavy' Whalley arrived in the tiny Scottish town of Lockerbie to a tragic scene that looms larger than any other in his 35 years of rescue experience in Scotland and beyond.

Everyone onboard the airline perished. A further 11 residents of the village died when the plane wreckage destroyed a row of houses on the ground.

Heavy, who is a younger brother of one of Bermuda's well-known road runners 'Flying Scotsman' Michael Whalley, can remember vividly the disaster scene, the bodies of passengers, many of them young students and children who were heading home for Christmas when they became victims of an unspeakable act.

With 15 years of mountain rescue already under his belt, Heavy had seen plenty of dead bodies before — as well as encountering successful moments when lost mountaineers, walkers or aircraft crash victims had been found alive.

But Lockerbie was altogether different. Relaxing in Bermuda with his brother, Heavy is currently giving lectures and after-dinner speeches in the US and Canada. While taking time out, he has enjoyed the beauty of Bermuda and given a talk at a local church about his lifetime career.

Heavy, who has just retired from the Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue after reaching his 55th birthday, was a senior team leader on December 21, 1988 when he arrived at Lockerbie an hour after the mid-air explosion.

His base at RAF Kinloss in the Scottish Highlands had earlier been alerted to the disappearance of Flight 103.

"It was 7 p.m. and the airplane had gone missing. It looked like it had disintegrated at 30,000 feet. Lockerbie is tiny; there was hardly any infrastructure to deal with this unique thing that had happened," said Heavy. "We had a quick look around and could see that everyone was dead. We had to wait for the fires to die down. It was a cold night.

At first light the next morning we started to search for the Black Box (flight recorder). By mid-day we had located 150 casualties. It was a gruesome task.

"I'd seen most things before, but nothing like this. Bodies were lying in the street and it was only days before Christmas. Suitcases and Christmas presents were scattered around. The aircraft was full of students going back to the States."

A Police officer was assigned to stand guard over each body.

Many of the bodies remained where they had been found for two days as it was a giant crime scene that had to be carefully recorded.

Wreckage was spread over 1,500 kms, although the task of finding it was made easier by the foresight of sending an RAF plane across the scene during the previous night with an infra-red detector to locate debris on the ground.

In the midst of it all the goodness of people also shone through, said Heavy.

After the rescue team created a base at the local school, women from a volunteer organisation appeared to set up a canteen, which they manned for many weeks while the rescue and investigation work continued.

"It was wonderful how people responded, practical things just happened that night," said Heavy, who was later awarded the British Empire Medal for his role in the Lockerbie aftermath.

In the years since, Heavy has used what he learned from the disaster to give useful insight to disaster management planners.

It was a love of the outdoors and the mountains that got Heavy interested in mountain rescue from an early age. He joined the Scottish Mountain Rescue and quickly gained the nickname 'Heavy' as a joke relating to the fact that, at the time, he was a skinny lad weighing only seven-and-a-half stone.

He joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), and became an integral part of its mountain rescue team, called upon regularly to assist with air crashes in the rugged mountains of Scotland — sometimes involving RAF or American Air Force craft that train in the region.

On one occasion it took three days battling through horrendous weather to reach the Cairngorms Plateau and the scene of a mid-air crash between two US F15 fighter jets.

Heavy was also on the scene of an RAF Chinook helicopter crash on the Isle of Mull that claimed the lives of a number of high ranking military officers.

From civilian aircraft crashes, to locating lost walkers and, increasingly, elderly people suffering from Alzheimer's who wander away from their homes and into the vast wilderness, Heavy has gained respect within the mountain rescue community, while at the same time enjoying a fulfilling career that has brought its fair share of joy at finding crash victims alive.

On one occasion a Swiss curling team's small plane came down in the mountains near Aberdeen. Five days later they were all found alive and their first response to seeing the rescuers was to offer to pay them for their efforts.

Heavy, who was awarded an MBE by the Queen, still loves to wander in the mountains, but also finds great joy simply from being in nature and during his visit to Bermuda enthused about the precious open spac0es he has found here, including the Railway Trail.

He urges the Island to do all it can to keep hold of its beautiful places of nature.