An updated 2027 edition of Falling Stars will mark the 80th anniversary of the loss of the TWA Lockheed Constellation “The Star of Cairo” at Shannon airport in late December 1946.
This new publication by author Peter McGarry is a follow-up to his original popular book.
Peter said: “Shannon’s blossoming success in the years 1946-1961 had a darker, more sobering side – as many international airports had in these early days of international commercial aviation.
Across these fifteen years, almost two hundred people lost their lives in the vicinity of Shannon. The number rises starkly to almost four hundred when one includes losses of flights both inbound and outbound from the airport.”
Since its earliest editions, Falling Stars has resulted in a growing stream of families from the US and Canada making their way to Shannon to be at sites where their family’s lives were so devastated all those years ago.
2026 has seen remarkably new insights into three crashes thanks to the visits of several families – The Star of Cairo (1946), Alitalia (1960) and President Airlines (1961).
‘The ghosts of these times lie within Falling Star’s pages’
Peter McGarry added: “No memorial yet exists at Shannon to remember these lost lives. To see a President Airlines Navigator’s daughter leave a floral tribute on the Shannon’s mud flats and say a quiet prayer certainly brings this Shannon history back home in a very real way.
It is my hope that Falling Stars through its updates serves as some kind of reminder that the safety of flight today is built on the back of these terrible losses which so deserve to be remembered.”
Falling Stars is the result of twenty years of research – and in an odd way serves as some kind of a memorial for now. Falling Stars is a complete history of a series of devastating air accidents at Shannon, but it is first and foremost, a human story.
*Peter was featured in an episode of Clare FM’s Atlantic Tales earlier this year.