It's curious how the Flash accident, which killed 148 people, was able to garner such widespread press coverage, while a similar and equally deadly crash went more or less unnoticed. I'm speaking of a 727 that barreled into the surf near the West African port of Cotonou, Benin, last Christmas Day, a week before the Flash disaster. Bound for Beirut, Lebanon, and transporting mainly Lebanese expatriates, the plane went down only seconds after takeoff killing more than 130 people (the exact count is disupted). Among the dead were 15 U.N. peacekeepers from Bangladesh who'd been serving in nearby Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as the airline owner's wife and son.

Roughly 20 people survived, though judging from the photos there wasn't much use for vests or rafts, as the Boeing broke into dozens of large -- and thousands of smaller -- pieces just off the beach. Among the survivors were the airline owner himself and, as news reports, such as they were, continually put it, "the pilot." (We assume this means the captain; a 727 requires a cockpit crew of three, but which crewman survived isn't clear.) Witnesses say the jet was overloaded, though, as we've talked about, such claims are best discounted until investigations have run their course.

Here we go, maybe, into the controversy of whether the Egyptian plane's Eurocentric manifest -- the passengers were French tourists -- made it more newsworthy than a charter of Lebanese expats headed to the Middle East from a country most Americans have never heard of.

Either way, it's not the first time a serious accident was abruptly consigned to the annals of history.

The 727 in Benin was operated by a Guinean company called UTA -- Union des Transports Africains. While the acronym is eerily coincidental, this is not the same UTA involved in perhaps the most notorious Lost Accident of them all, the bombing of UTA 772 over the Sahara in 1989.

That UTA -- Union de Transport Aèriens, eventually absorbed into Air France -- was a storied airline specializing in routes to former French colonies and territories. Its network -- across West Africa and deep into the South Pacific -- was among the world's most exotic and far-flung. In September of '89, only nine months after the far more famous Lockerbie catastrophe, flight 772 was blown up by terrorists on a flight from Brazzaville, Congo, to Paris.

A hundred and seventy people from 17 countries (seven Americans) were killed when a bomb went off, Lockerbie style, in the forward luggage hold of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet's most remote areas. A news photograph of the DC-10's crushed forward fuselage -- the blue and white paint so incongruously stark against the dun-colored emptiness, is one of the more evocatively gruesome images you'll see. Viewing this picture, it's impossible not to recall the iconic photo of the Pan Am 747's cockpit lying in the grass near Lockerbie. Blue and white, again.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that's probably because the 772 disaster has been back in the news of late. In another Lockerbie parallel, it was widely assumed that the Libyan government had orchestrated the bombing, and eventually a French court convicted six in absentia, including the brother in law of that wily and wackiest of Bedouins, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi.

Gadhafi has since agreed to blood money settlements for Libya's hand in both bombings. The UTA agreement doles out a million dollars to each of the families of the 170 victims. More than 2.7 billion, meanwhile, has been promised to the Lockerbie next of kin.

In January, a U.S. government delegation touched down in Tripoli for the first time in three decades, eager to mend relations with the suddenly apologist -- or maybe "scared" is the operative word -- Gadhafi. So it goes in global politics, of course, but not everybody is apt to forgive the wayward Colonel.

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