TWA Flight 800

TWA Flight 800 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, United States, to Fiumicino Airport in Rome, Italy, with a stopover at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France. On July 17, 1996, at approximately 8:31p.m. EDT, twelve minutes after takeoff, the Boeing 747 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York.

All 230 people on board were killed in the crash; it is the third-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history. Accident investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) traveled to the scene, arriving the following morning The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and New York Police Department Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) initiated a parallel criminal investigation. Sixteen months later, the JTTF announced that no evidence of a criminal act had been found and closed its active investigation.

The four-year NTSB investigation concluded with the approval of the Aircraft Accident Report on August 23, 2000, ending the most extensive, complex, and costly air disaster investigation in U.S. history up to that time. The report's conclusion was that the probable cause of the accident was the explosion of flammable fuel vapors in the center fuel tank. Although it could not be determined with certainty, the likely ignition source was a short circuit.

Accident

thumb|The close-up view of N93119's front fuselage, in 1972, showing the seven plugged windows on the upper deck. These plugs were blown out following the explosion of Flight 800.

On the day of the accident, the airplane departed from Ellinikon International Airport in Athens, Greece, as TWA Flight 881 and arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4:38 p.m. The aircraft was then refueled and the crew was changed.

The crew was led by 58-year-old Captain Ralph G. Kevorkian, who had flown for TWA for 31 years and the U.S. Air Force for nine years and had logged 18,700 flight hours, including 5,490 on the Boeing 747. Captain/check airman Steven E. Snyder, 57, had flown for TWA for 32 years and had logged 17,200 flight hours, including 4,700 on the Boeing 747. Flight engineer/check airman Richard G. Campbell Jr., 63, had flown for TWA for 30 years and the U.S. Air Force for 12 years and had logged 18,500 flight hours, including 3,800 on the Boeing 747. Also with the crew was 25-year-old flight engineer trainee Oliver Krick, who previously served as a business pilot for four years and had 2,520 flight hours, including 30 on the Boeing 747. Krick had flown for TWA for 26 days and was starting the sixth leg of his initial operating experience training. The NTSB Final Report gives Oliver Krick's age as being 24,

The ground-maintenance crew locked out the thrust reverser for engine No. 3 (treated as a minimum equipment list item) because of technical problems with the thrust reverser sensors during the landing of TWA 881 at JFK, before Flight 800's departure. Additionally, severed cables for the engine's thrust reverser were replaced. During refueling of the aircraft, the volumetric shutoff (VSO) control was believed to have been triggered before the tanks were full. To continue the pressure fueling, a TWA mechanic overrode the automatic VSO by pulling the volumetric fuse and an overflow circuit breaker. Maintenance records indicate that the aircraft had numerous VSO-related maintenance writeups in the weeks before the accident.

thumbnail|right|Flight path of TWA 800: The colored rectangles are areas from which wreckage was recovered. The last recorded radar [[transponder (aeronautics)|transponder return from the airplane was recorded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radar site at Trevose, Pennsylvania, at 8:31:12 p.m. reported to Boston ARTCC that he "just saw an explosion out here", adding, "we just saw an explosion up ahead of us here ... about or something like that, it just went down... into the water." Subsequently, many air traffic control facilities in the New York City and Long Island areas received reports of an explosion from other pilots operating in the area.

Background

Aircraft

The aircraft involved, manufactured in July 1971, was a Boeing 747-131 registered as N93119 with serial number 20083. It had completed 16,869 flights in 93,303 hours of operation and was powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7AH turbofan engines.

Crew and passengers

{|class="wikitable sortable collapsed floatright"

|- style="background:#ccf;"

|+ Final tally of passenger nationalities

!|Nationality|||Passengers|||Crew|||Total

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |40||||style="text-align:center;" |40

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |1||||style="text-align:center;" |1

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |1||||style="text-align:center;" |1

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |1||||style="text-align:center;" |1

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |7||style="text-align:center;" |1||style="text-align:center;" |8

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |2||||style="text-align:center;" |2

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |2||||style="text-align:center;" |2

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |1||||style="text-align:center;" |1

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |5||||style="text-align:center;" |5

|- valign=top

||| style="text-align:center;" |152||style="text-align:center;" |17||style="text-align:center;" |169

|- valign=top class="sortbottom"

|Total||style="text-align:center;" |212||style="text-align:center;" |18||style="text-align:center;" |230

Michel Breistroff, French ice hockey player
Marcel Dadi, French guitarist
David Hogan, American composer
Jed Johnson, Andy Warhol's partner of twelve years, interior designer, and director
Pam Lychner, American crime victims' rights advocate and former TWA flight attendant, along with two daughters
Rico Puhlmann, German fashion photographer. One of his clients, Polish fashion model Agnieszka Kotlarska (Miss Polski and Miss International), was originally supposed to be on the flight with him but backed out at the last minute. She was murdered a month later by a stalker outside her home.
Courtney Elizabeth Johns, sister of future comic book writer Geoff Johns and the inspiration for the DC Comics superhero Courtney Whitmore / Stargirl
Ana Maria Shorter, musician Wayne Shorter's second wife, and the couple's niece, Dalila, daughter of singer Jon Lucien
Jack O'Hara, executive producer of ABC Sports, along with his wife and daughter. He was going to France to supervise coverage of the Tour de France in what was to be his last assignment for the network after being let go the previous week.

In addition, 16 students and five adult chaperones from the French Club of the Montoursville Area High School in Pennsylvania were on board.

Initial investigation

The NTSB was notified at approximately 8:50 p.m. on the day of the accident. A full "go team" was assembled in Washington, D.C. The team arrived on the scene early the next morning. As the NTSB does not investigate criminal activity, the United States Attorney General is empowered to declare an investigation for accidents that are potentially linked to a criminal act and to require the NTSB to relinquish control of the investigation to the FBI. In the case of TWA 800, the FBI initiated a parallel criminal investigation alongside the NTSB's accident investigation.

Search-and-recovery operations

Search-and-recovery operations were conducted by federal, state, and local agencies, as well as by government contractors.

Tensions in the investigation

Relatives of TWA 800 passengers and crew, as well as the media, gathered at the Ramada Plaza JFK Hotel. Many waited until the remains of their family members had been recovered, identified and released. This hotel became known as the "Heartbreak Hotel" for its role in hosting families of victims of several airliner crashes.

Many grieving relatives became angry because of TWA's delayed confirmation of the passenger list, Although NTSB vice chairman Robert Francis stated that all bodies were retrieved as soon as they were spotted and that wreckage was recovered only if divers believed that victims were hidden underneath,

Anger and political pressure were also directed at Suffolk County medical examiner Charles V. Wetli as recovered bodies backlogged at the morgue.

Witness interviews

[[File:Twa 800 witness 319.PNG|right|thumb|An FBI witness statement summary (with personal information redacted)

Approximately 80 FBI agents conducted interviews with potential witnesses daily.

Within days of the crash, the NTSB announced its intent to form its own witness group and to interview witnesses to the crash. before both abruptly stopped at 8:31:12 p.m. In addition, the backs of several damaged passenger seats were observed bearing an unknown red/brown-shaded substance. An overpressure event was defined as a rapid increase in pressure resulting in failure of the structure of the CWT. tests recreating the flight conditions showed the combination of liquid fuel and fuel-air vapor to be flammable. CIA analysts, relying on sound-propagation analysis, concluded that the witnesses could not be describing a missile approaching an intact aircraft, but were seeing a trail of burning fuel coming from the aircraft after the initial explosion.

thumb|A frame from the NTSB's animation depicting how the noseless plane climbed erratically before descending into the ocean

The NTSB's review of the released witness documents determined that they contained 736 witness accounts, of which 258 were characterized as "streak of light" witnesses ("an object moving in the sky... variously described [as] a point of light, fireworks, a flare, a shooting star, or something similar.")

Though the FQIS itself was designed to prevent danger by minimizing voltages and currents, the innermost tube of Flight 800's FQIS compensator showed damage similar to that of the compensator tube identified as the ignition source for the surge tank fire that destroyed a 747 near Madrid in 1976.

Controversy

After the accident, former Joint Chief of Staff Thomas Moorer and former White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger speculated that the airplane was destroyed by a missile, with a nearby U.S. Navy ship being the likely culprit. The NTSB's conclusions about the cause of the TWA 800 disaster took four years and one month to be published. The FBI's earliest investigations and interviews, later used by the NTSB, were performed under the assumption of a missile attack, a fact noted in the NTSB's final report. Six months into the investigation, the NTSB's chairman, Jim Hall, was quoted as saying, "All three theories—a bomb, a missile, or mechanical failure—remain." Speculation was fueled in part by early descriptions, visuals, and eyewitness accounts of the disaster that indicated a sudden explosion and trails of fire moving in an upward direction.

On June 19, 2013, the NTSB acknowledged in a press release that they received a petition for reconsideration of the investigation into the July 17, 1996, crash of TWA Flight 800. In 2014, the NTSB declined the petition to reopen the investigation. In a press release, the NTSB stated: "After a thorough review of all the information provided by the petitioners, the NTSB denied the petition in its entirety because the evidence and analysis presented did not show the original findings were incorrect."

Aftermath

thumb|A wreath is cast into the Atlantic Ocean after a ceremony to honor the deaths of the occupants.

Many Internet users responded to the incident; the resulting Web traffic set records for Internet activity at the time. CNN's traffic quadrupled to 3.9 million views per day. The Web site of The New York Times had its traffic increase to 1.5 million views per day, 50% higher than its previous rate. In 1996, few U.S. government Web sites were updated daily, but the United States Navy's crash Web site was constantly updated and had detailed information about the salvage of the crash site.

The wreckage was moved to a purpose-built NTSB facility in Ashburn, Virginia. The reconstructed aircraft was used to train accident investigators until it was decommissioned in 2021.

thumb | right | The reconstruction of Flight 800 used as a training aid in NTSB's Training Center in Ashburn, Virginia

In 2008, the Department of Transportation issued a final rule designed to prevent accidents caused by fuel-tank explosions. The rule required airlines to pump inert gas into the tanks. The rule covered the CWT on all new passenger and cargo airliners, and passenger planes built in most of the 1990s, but not on old cargo planes. The NTSB had first recommended such a rule just five months after the incident and 33 years after a similar recommendation issued by the Civil Aeronautics Board Bureau of Safety on December 17, 1963, nine days after the crash of Pan Am Flight 214.

The crash of TWA Flight 800, and that of ValuJet Flight 592 earlier in 1996, prompted Congress to pass the Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act of 1996 as part of the federal aviation appropriations bill. Among other things, the act gives NTSB, instead of the particular airline involved, responsibility for coordinating services to the families of victims of fatal aircraft accidents in the United States. In addition, it restricts lawyers and other parties from contacting family members within 30 days of the accident.

During the investigation, the NTSB and the FBI clashed with each other. The agencies lacked a detailed protocol describing which agency should take the lead when it was initially unclear whether an event was an accident or a criminal act. At the time of the crash, 49 CFR 831.5 specified that the NTSB's aviation accident investigations have priority over all other federal investigations. After the TWA flight 800 investigation, the NTSB recognized the need for better clarity. to clarify the issue in 49 USC 1131(a)(2)(B), which was amended in 2000 to read: