Lockerbie is a town in southwest Scotland. Most English speakers who know the name know it because of one night in 1988: a US passenger plane, Pan Am Flight 103, blew up in the air and fell on the town. Two hundred and seventy people died — everyone on the plane, and eleven people on the ground. The plane was carrying a bomb. Courts and governments later treated this as a terrorist attack linked to Libya: a Libyan man was given a life sentence in a Scottish prison, and the Libyan government later said it was responsible. People still say “the Lockerbie bombing” when they mean that crash. The town itself is a real place with ordinary life; the name in the news is almost always the disaster, not a travel guide.