On this day in 1998, Swissair Flight 111 left New York for Geneva and came down in the Atlantic off Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia, after a fire broke out above the cockpit ceiling. All 229 people aboard, 215 passengers and 14 crew, were killed. The wreckage lay about eight kilometres from shore, and the fishing communities along that coast went out that night and kept going out for weeks.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada spent more than four years on the investigation. Divers and trawlers recovered something like two million fragments, and investigators reassembled a portion of the forward fuselage piece by piece on a frame, so they could see where the burning had started and how far it had travelled. They traced the fire to electrical arcing in wiring above the cockpit, and found that the metallised polyethylene terephthalate insulation blankets in that part of the aircraft would propagate a flame rather than resist it. Test standards for that material were found not to reflect how it behaved in a real aircraft.

Those blankets were replaced across the affected fleets, and the flammability test for aircraft insulation materials was rewritten. The memorial stone below stands on the rock near Peggys Cove, in English and in French, and names no cause at all.