STANDING on the rooftop observation deck at Heathrow Airport, they clutch onto each other for support. With tears trickling down their cheeks, their eyes lock onto the white jet, watching it take off and following it until it becomes a pinprick in the dark night sky. Every fibre in their bodies is willing it to reach New York safely.

The call that they have longed for comes after 45 minutes. Pan American flight 103 has passed over Lockerbie safely. Unable to contain their emotions, a cheer goes up among the group of crew members and airline personnel.

It is December 21, 1989 - exactly a year to the day that their friends and colleagues lost their lives when the PanAm flight was blown up over Lockerbie. Among them, offering support through the traumatic first voyage of flight 103 in a year, is Dr Lyn Franchino, a grief counsellor and support work volunteer with the charity Cruse Bereavement Care.

"It was very, very emotional and very tearful," recalls Dr Franchino.

"It almost felt as if they had held their breath for 45 minutes, the time it took to go over Lockerbie, and when the plane passed over they actually cheered. It was a kind of relief. It was a different plane, and a different flight, but in their minds they had made it.

"They felt it was very important for them to see it. It was as if they were willing this plane to get there."

Dr Franchino was there for the airline staff to talk to if they needed it before the flight and to help prepare them for the time when they would watch the jet depart. Some had been due to fly on the doomed flight a year earlier and still harboured feelings of guilt and anger.

She recalls one crew member having missed the flight only because he had been injured by a car running over his foot while he was in London.

"Someone had told him that from the time the bomb went off, the people at the back of the plane would have had 15 seconds before they lost consciousness," says Dr Franchino. "So he spent an awful lot of time holding his breath for 15 seconds trying to understand what it must have been like."

Dr Franchino, 61, understands his grief only too well, having counselled victims and bereaved families of some of the most harrowing disasters of our times, including the Hillsborough tragedy, the Clapham rail disaster and the September 11 terror attacks.

Following September 11, she flew over to New York with the North Wales Cruse Bereavement Care team (Cruse is the leading charity in the UK specialising in bereavement) for a week to support the British families who were desperate for news of their loved ones.

The team greeted the families at the airport and took them to a family relation centre so that they could gain information on how to cope with their grief and practical support. At every turn, the Cruse volunteers were there, offering support 24 hours a day. They helped families who had to give DNA samples, which they knew would be used to identify any possible remains of their loved ones and they escorted bereaved relatives to the disaster site, Ground Zero.

Dr Franchino recalls their sense of profound shock. "It's one thing to watch it on television but quite another to actually go and see the size of it," she says. "It was such a shock to them. Some of them had never even flown before and here they were, flying to a foreign country to carry out the most horrendous thing they could ever imagine."

At any major incident, such as September 11, it is the practical help which the families find beneficial in the aftermath of the attack, she says. In those dark moments, when the bereaved person's world has been ripped apart, when they are desperate for information and may be injured, it is the gentle questioning by counsellors and support workers - do the children need picking up? Is there anyone we can contact? - which proves invaluable. It may mean escorting them to the mortuary to identify a loved one or translating hospital jargon into plain English.

"In the very early hours it's just there. It's not forced on anyone," says Dr Franchino of her work as a Cruse volunteer, adding that in the days afterwards, it is about helping them to understand the kinds of feelings they may experience.

"The shock is actually the body's means of protecting us from something that's too terrible to contemplate," she says. "Some people can suffer from shock for months and others for weeks. They may feel sick or have pains in different places. They may be having nightmares or flashbacks if they saw something themselves. Emotionally they could experience guilt or anger. The guilty might ask, 'Why did I survive?'

"If it's a man-made disaster, anger would be directed towards the people who were responsible. If it's a natural disaster it can be directed at emergency personnel or even God."

Grief counselling can help people with their experiences, and in particular group therapy, which can bring about "normalisation" when they hear other people's stories and realise they are not alone.

Counselling can also help children, who are often protected from the full details of events happening around them. The probing questions they ask can bring distress to their emotionally exhausted parents.

"They might ask things like 'What does it feel like to be blown up?' or 'What's it like to jump out of a building like the victims of September 11?' which can be very upsetting for parents," says Dr Franchino.

"All too often parents try to protect them by not telling them the truth. Part of the work with the children involves allowing them to talk about how they feel through drawing or play therapy."

The grief experienced can last for years after the event, not helped by a constant round of legal hearings, inquests, and anniversaries which help keep the tragedy in the media and in the relatives' own minds. Dr Franchino saw clients at her private practice in Surrey who came in with various problems before realising that they could all be traced back to the Clapham rail disaster which had happened years earlier.

"For a lot of people, the inquests and the legal hearings keep the whole thing raw and alive," she says. "Some people direct their anger and grief into forming groups, such as campaigning for justice. But some find that once the campaign has finished then suddenly they haven't got a cause any longer. It's important that people don't make this their sole reason for being, and that they work very hard to keep as much normality as possible."

Equally as important in her work is ensuring that emergency workers are emotionally equipped to deal with what they may see. Dr Franchino, who is holding a three-day course for Tees Valley Cruse Bereavement Care in the region, uses the harrowing scenes at Lockerbie, New York and Hillsborough in her training of emergency workers. It is training, she says, which helps her keep her distance at major incidents and is imperative for emergency workers to undergo, to prepare them for what they might see and experience.

"Just because you're a nurse or a police officer doesn't mean that you're not a human who's going to be affected by this as well," she says.

She is equally keen for local authorities to think of more than the practical issues when they are emergency planning."What they don't seem very often to be aware of is who's going in there to support these people and that includes emergency personnel," she says.

"In my view, these kind of events are so outside the normal experience that anybody would benefit from support."

l Lyn Franchino's three-day course is at the International Fire Training Centre at Durham Tees Valley Airport from November 11 to 13. For more information, contact (01325) 252777.