The events leading up to the crash of TWA Flight 800 could have been torn from the opening pages of a post-Cold War thriller.
Ramzi Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, had just gone on trial for planning to blow up 11 airliners, a plot that prosecutors branded “terror in the skies.”
In Atlanta, security concerns jangled the nerves of a city about to hold the long-awaited Olympics. Across the ocean in Paris, the U.S., its allies and Russia prepared for an end-of-the-month summit on terrorism, the scourge of the post-Cold War world.
In a novel, those ominous portents would have been followed by some unspeakable act of terror. Real life, it turned out, is far more gripping than a summer blockbuster.
A year after its explosion shattered the night skies off Long Island, TWA Flight 800 remains a mystery. It also poses questions about airline safety and security for American travelers.
The way the government and the media handled the crisis only fed the mistrust with which many citizens regard official explanations.
Two days before the Olympics opened, on July 17, 1996, at about 8:45 p.m., a Boeing 747 jumbo jet en route to Paris exploded in midair off the southern coast of Long Island, 11 minutes after takeoff. All 230 people on board, including 16 high school seniors on their first trip abroad, died.
Within hours, media speculation zeroed in on the possibility that sabotage caused the crash. Within days, that idea became fixed in the public mind, in large part due to media accounts based on incomplete or inaccurate leaks from inside the investigation.
Either a bomb or a missile, the nation initially thought, had brought down the plane.
As the months dragged on, that rush to judgment has dissolved into uncertainty. Catastrophic mechanical failure has emerged as the most likely cause.
The investigation has cost at least $30 million and thousands of hours of work, and federal agencies still cannot give a definitive answer on what caused the plane to go down. Until they do, Flight 800 will remain the fifth unexplained crash in U.S. aviation history.
The victims’ families, like the American public, don’t like that.
“I want to know why 230 people perished,” said Frank Carven, a Maryland lawyer who lost a sister and a niece. “If it is some kind of design flaw, or mechanical issue, they had better find it.”
The last year has been frustrating for investigators too. It began with the painfully slow process of dredging clues from a crash site spread over 40 square miles of ocean 10 miles from Long Island’s south shore. After mapping the site with sophisticated sonar, the government mobilized hundreds of divers who made more than 4,000 undersea trips. For weeks, the highest priority was recovering bodies. To this day, 14 have not been found.
Over the months, the investigation stretched from the crime labs in Washington, D.C., to a worldwide monitoring of suspected terrorists; from command posts in New York City to the abandoned hangar in Calverton, Long Island, where almost 900 fragments of the shattered airplane have been reassembled on scaffolding.
The reassembly of the center section of the fuselage where the fatal explosion occurred stretches 92 feet, the longest such re-creation in history. Hundreds of scientists, criminologists and aircraft experts continue to pore over this giant jigsaw puzzle that stubbornly refuses to reveal the element that triggered its destruction.
Last week, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James Hall told a subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that “there is no evidence of a bomb or a missile impact in the wreckage.
“We have determined that the fuel/air vapor in the center fuel tank exploded and that the explosion of the tank initiated the breakup of the airplane,” he said. “We have not yet determined what ignited the fuel vapor in the center tank.”
Hall then outlined six possible scenarios that might have set off the fatal explosion. Four of the six involved accidental electrical sparks. There’s no evidence to support these theories, either.
NTSB officials, while cautiously signaling that they believe it was an accident, still haven’t ruled out the possibility that a small bomb may have been placed on the outside of the near-empty center fuel tank, whose explosion was the proximate cause of the crash.
They won’t even rule out the idea that a fragment from a missile or a meteorite may have pierced the tank and set off the volatile vapors inside.
The crash investigation put the NTSB, which has primary responsibility for investigating crashes, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has primary responsibility for investigating suspected terrorist acts on U.S. soil, side by side in the hunt to discover the reason for Flight 800’s fate.
It also put them at each others’ throats.
The small army of FBI officials, including 600 officers in the New York office alone, insisted that each piece of wreckage be handled as if it were evidence that one day might end up in court. The outmanned NTSB, which has only 120 aviation investigators nationwide, wanted to know what caused the plane to go down so it could recommend measures to avoid similar accidents in the future.
The FBI still hasn’t given up its quest. The agency will spend another two to three months looking for that missing piece of evidence that would turn the crash into a crime.
But now even FBI officials are saying that chances are extremely remote that they will turn up the piece of wreckage proving a human had masterminded the crash. In the investigation into the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockberbie, Scotland, that piece turned out to be a thumbnail-size shard from a radio lodged in a seat cushion.
“It looks at this point very likely that it’s not criminal,” said James Kallstrom, assistant director of the FBI. “But we’re not done.”
That’s a marked change in attitude from the one Kallstrom displayed immediately after the crash. During the early months of the investigation, he publicly echoed the official line that there were still three theories (bomb, missile or accident) under consideration.
He then used carefully orchestrated background briefings to cue the media that it would be only a matter of time before the crucial piece of evidence proving sabotage would be found. At one point, he referred to the people who may have done it as “cowards.”
The NTSB officials on the scene became alarmed as media accounts ran with either false information or misleading implications. They began their own efforts to control publicity.
Meanwhile, national, state and local politicians, intent on appearing engaged in the proceedings, exacerbated the confusion. New York Gov. George Pataki, for example, one day enraged families with an incorrect announcement that 60 to 100 bodies had been located.
The Internet added to the misinformation. Hundreds of Web postings endlessly hashed over the stories of Long Island eyewitnesses who saw a streak of light just before the explosion. The FBI interviewed them all. Some said the streak was heading toward the plane; some said the opposite.
For many Internet writers, those reports became primary fodder for their pet theory: that a missile, possibly even a case of friendly fire, brought down the plane. Months later, Pierre Salinger, former press secretary in the Kennedy White House and a one-time ABC journalist based in Paris, would recycle those stories and set off another round of official denials.
Some of the nation’s leading newspapers and broadcasters were wrongheaded in their own fashion.
As the bits and pieces of the destroyed jet were brought ashore, a steady stream of leaks flowed from law enforcement officials “close to” the investigation.
Fed by such sources, one media account said the recovered landing gear “proved” there had been a bomb. Later, the sudden and simultaneous cutoff of the aircraft’s flight-date recorders “suggested” a bomb.
When investigators in late August found traces of a chemical used in plastic explosives in a seat cushion, banner headlines trumpeted the “prime evidence” that a device had exploded inside the cabin of the doomed jetliner. A few weeks later, FBI officials concluded that the chemicals likely came aboard during a bomb-sniffing exercise for police dogs.
All along, NTSB and Boeing Co. officials cautioned against hasty conclusions. There have been 26 center fuel tank explosions that have brought down large military and civilian jet aircraft. Most of those crashes remain either unexplained or have proved to be accidents.
In December, the NTSB recommended that airlines take steps to fill fuel tanks with inert gas as they empty their aviation fuel.
That way, even if a spark or bomb goes off nearby, it wouldn’t trigger an explosion of the residue of volatile gases.
The FAA has so far been reluctant to order the costly change in airline procedure. “We do not have sufficient information to determine whether the board’s recommendations would improve safety,” one official said.
There also has been little movement on the security front, especially since the focus of the investigation shifted from thwarting terrorism to thwarting accidents.
In the days after the crash, President Clinton flew to Kennedy International Airport to be with the victims’ relatives. While he cautioned against jumping to conclusions, he unveiled a series of measures aimed almost exclusively at bolstering airport security.
They included installing high-technology explosive detection equipment at U.S. airports; requiring criminal background checks on airport security workers; and having airlines conduct bag-passenger matches on all domestic flights.
A follow-up commission headed by Vice President Al Gore included those recommendations in a report that also called for upgrading the nation’s air traffic control system. The combined cost of the package was more than $2 billion.
Few of the recommendations have been implemented. Last week, the FAA announced a limited bag-passenger matching program due to begin Dec. 31, but it is estimated to affect only about 5 percent of all domestic passengers.
The one measure that has come out of the crash of Flight 800 is legislation requiring the NTSB to make it part of its mandate to provide timely information and services for the families of victims of air crashes.
A number of politicians and family members criticized TWA and government officials as they scrambled to deal with the immediate aftermath of the crash.
There appears to be little of that sentiment today among the family members still coping with grief.
“Kallstrom, Hall, these people have done everything possible,” said William Rogers of Montoursville, Pa., whose 17-year-old daughter Kimberly died in the crash. “They have been kind beyond kind and done a tremendous job.”
