Boy, 16, and 80-year-old man die in light aircraft crash near Loch Lomond
Diving into a story like this, I keep circling the questions nobody has answered yet. Two people, sixty-four years apart in age, sharing the same final instant over one of Scotland's most photographed landscapes. Grandfather and grandson on an afternoon outing? An instructor passing on the love of flight to a kid who'd barely started his life? The appeal of small planes has always been that raw closeness to the sky, but that intimacy can turn merciless in seconds.
There's something about the bareness of the report that makes it stick. Emergency services called at 16:45, both dead at the scene. No names released, no cause mentioned, no word on weather or mechanical trouble. The investigation will stretch for weeks, and eventually we'll get fragments of an answer, but the blunt fact of it just sits there.
I'd want to know what the winds were doing over Loch Lomond that afternoon. I'd want to know how many hours the aircraft had logged and whether this flight was just beginning or already homeward bound. Mostly I'd want to know who these two people were outside the crash report, because behind every accident file there are families on both sides trying to rebuild a story that ended without warning.