Minutes after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport in New York, a Boeing 747 bound for Paris exploded in flight over the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island on July 17, 1996, leaving all 230 people on board . The four-year investigation into the cause of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 was the longest and, at $ 40 million, the most expensive in the history of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The flight took off at 8:19 pm in heavy weather but “quite clear”, according to The New York Times, exploding in an explosion of fire 12 minutes later. Among the dead were 18 crew members and 212 passengers, including 16 students and five chaperones from the Montoursville Area High School French Club in Pennsylvania.
Witnesses in the crash area reported seeing an explosion in the night sky, followed by a shower of flaming debris. Almost immediately, there was speculation that the plane had been the target of a terrorist attack, with many saying they spotted what appeared to be a missile heading towards the plane just before it exploded.
Although the source of the explosion was never discovered, the investigation concluded that the cause of the crash was not a terrorist attack, but an electrical failure that ignited a central wing fuel tank. almost empty in the 25-year-old plane. The event remains one of the deadliest plane crashes in U.S. history.
“The investigation into the accident to flight TWA 800 is a watershed moment in the history of aviation safety,” the director general of the safety council said in a 2021 statement. “From this investigation, we have issued safety recommendations that fundamentally changed the way airplanes are designed. “
Investigation
Almost all of the parts of the 170-ton jet were recovered from the ocean floor and rebuilt as part of the investigation that followed. Following the NTSB’s decision, the plane was used to train plane crash investigators and the families of the victims were allowed to visit it, although it was never opened to the public. On July 7, 2021, 25 years after the crash, the NTSB will decommission the wreckage, which will be destroyed by the end of 2022. A 3D scan of the reconstruction will be performed for historical recording.
John Purvis, head of the Boeing Company Accident Investigation Unit at the time of the occurrence, says aircraft blasts are fairly rare, in part due to safety measures and improved equipment.
“The explosion that occurred on TWA 800 was in the center wing fuel tank and was not coming from anything outside,” he says. “The NTSB was never able to identify the precise cause, but it was clear that it was coming from inside the tank.”
Purvis says that while four years is a long time for an investigation, it is not outside of accepted limits.
“It was one of the two or three more complex accidents that I have been involved in in my 17 years of doing this kind of work. In fact, it was perhaps the most complicated, ”he says. “In the first days and weeks after the accident, the FBI was in charge because there was concern that it was a crime. This added time to the investigation.
According to commercial aviation historian Shea Oakley, NTSB investigations are almost never short-term business.
“When the rare fatal air crash does occur, it usually involves a ‘chain of causation’, comprising a number of seemingly unrelated little anomalies that together create a sort of ‘perfect storm’ that causes a crash,” he says. he. “It takes a lot of time and high-tech detective work to piece together the often seemingly disparate in-flight events that together lead to a major accident.”
Oakley says the length of the Flight 800 investigation was due to several factors. First, the time it took to isolate the circumstances that caused a very rare event – the central fuel tank explosion, which he adds had never happened with a 747. … many circles to make absolutely sure that it was not the result of a terrorist operation or a stray missile fired by our army or that of another nation.
New safety guidelines
According to Oakley, the 25 years since the tragic crash of Flight 800 included the safest years in American commercial aviation history.
“The safety of air travel, in general, has steadily improved since the widespread use of jets began in 1958,” he says. “Among the accidents that have occurred, spontaneous explosions in the air have always been responsible for a very small percentage of the total. “
He says fatal incidents tend to occur when a plane is unintentionally flown in severe weather conditions, usually a thunderstorm or, very rarely, a form of clear air turbulence (CAT).
“With today’s very sophisticated weather radars and the strict rules for avoiding potentially dangerous weather conditions, this hardly ever happens,” Oakley said. “So losing Flight 800 to an in-flight explosion of another type was indeed a very rare occurrence.”
Following its final report on the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board issued several safety recommendations, including regular maintenance programs and design standards for fuel tanks.
“Many recommendations have emerged from the completed investigation, including changes in daily operating procedures to central fuel tank modifications on other 747s,” Oakley said. “It’s fair to say that we’ll never see another crash like this involving this type of plane. Eliminating the possibility of the same type of incident happening again is almost always the result of a thorough investigation of the accident, and it was certainly as broad as humanly possible.
Conspiracy theories remain
Despite official Security Council findings, over the past two decades, conspiracy theorists, supported by eyewitness testimony of a missile strike, continue to claim that a terrorist attack, bombardment, or even a Friendly fire destroyed Flight 800.
According to Purvis, the security council addressed the idea of the missile in its report.
“I made two visits to the model the NTSB assembled from the wreckage in a hangar on Long Island at the time,” he says. “I spent a fair amount of time examining the wreckage, looking for signs of missile / projectile entry. I didn’t see any, and the real experts, who were way better than me, didn’t see anything either. However, I think the most compelling reason for saying that it was not shot down is that no one has ever claimed responsibility for any act against the aircraft. For me, it is impossible for secrets like this to be kept secret for very long.
Oakley notes that from the distant perspective of witnesses on the ground, the sequence of the explosion, a sudden change in gravity, and a continuous forward momentum that caused a temporary steep climb, as well as the dive vertical and the plane’s fiery descent, the crash might have looked like the result of some kind of attack.
“What many thought was a missile was actually the agony of a plane that climbed briefly before it fell, unfortunately and inevitably,” Oakley said. “So the appearance of a missile was essentially an optical illusion.”
