Birds chirp cheerfully and the soothing sound of the waves softly swishing ashore hide the horrors that exploded here decades ago.
No visible signs remain of the Cubana 455 tragedy save for a solemn stone obelisk erected in 1998 at the aptly-named Payne’s Bay, St James, on which the title of the youngest passenger, the nine-year-old Guyanese girl, Sabrina, is carved at the top of one stern facade but only as a male misnomer and in a symbolically severed surname – Harry Paul. Nearly five miles out, what is left of 57 other people and their ruptured tomb lie hidden 1 800 feet under the sparkling blue sea.
Yet 40 years on, former pilot Jim Lynch clearly remembers the sharp stench of jet fuel. It was everywhere that indelible day, sickening slicks of it seeping among the strewn plane wreckage and human remains floating in the calm expanse, when he joined a Barbadian Coast Guard cutter and they sped across from the south side on that surreal, sunny October 1976 afternoon following the downing of the Douglas DC 8 airliner.
