TWA Flight 800 last chapter
Wreckage of doomed plane to be destroyed years after explosion and investigation
Twenty-five years ago, a Boeing 747 flying from New York City to Paris exploded in midair and broke apart just off the coast of Long Island. All 230 people on board the plane, Trans World Airlines Flight 800, were killed, and the wreckage plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean.
In the lengthy investigation that followed, the National Transportation Safety Board had workers salvage the remains from the ocean floor and painstakingly reconstruct the plane. When they finished, the reconstruction was moved to a warehouse in Virginia, where it has been used to train plane crash investigators for nearly two decades.
But with the lease on the warehouse nearing its end, the agency announced plans Monday to decommission and destroy the remaining wreckage from one of the deadliest plane crashes in U.S. history.
The destruction will erase some of the last physical traces of an expensive, fouryear investigation that concluded electrical failure brought down the plane — a finding disputed by conspiracy theorists who believed a missile was responsible— and that had a lasting impact.
“The investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800 is a seminal moment in aviation safety history,” the safety board’s managing director, Sharon Bryson, said in a statement. “From that investigation, we issued safety recommendations that fundamentally changed the way aircraft are designed.”
The decision will also remove one of the most tangible links that loved ones have to the victims of the accident. While the reconstruction is closed to the public, the victims’ families have been allowed to visit over the years.
The safety board said that recent developments in its investigative techniques, including technologies like 3D scanning and drone imagery, made the reconstruction less crucial to its training program. It will stop using the reconstruction July 7, 10 days before the 25th anniversary of the crash, which took place July 17, 1996.
The flight took off at 8:19 p.m., around dusk, in fairly clear weather. Twelve minutes later, it blew apart in the sky, about 10 miles south of Long Island.
Witnesses in the area, many of whom were outside on a muggy summer night, reported seeing an explosion and, in some cases, a blazing fireball over the Atlantic as debris showered from the sky.
The horrifying crash gripped the world. Almost immediately, there was speculation that it had been a terrorist attack, a theory bolstered when some witnesses told authorities that they thought they saw a flare or a missile heading toward the plane just before the explosion.
What followed was the longest and most costly investigation in the agency’s history. Over the next year, workers searching for the source of the explosion pulled tons of wreckage from the water, recovering about 95% of the plane, then sorted it in an effort to identify parts of the Boeing plane before finally reassembling it.
It was only after four years and an inquiry that cost about $40 million that the safety board issued a report in 2000 that found no evidence of an attack and instead blamed the electrical failure, which they said had ignited a nearly empty fuel tank.
The report eventually led federal officials to require airlines to pump inert gas into tanks, making them less flammable.